Jake

yeah.

I think that most of the tech in iMuse is pretty commonplace at this point, at least the non-midi stuff. It's just never been done well. Also, when do patents expire?

PAL vs NTSC isn't as big of an issue with digital SD formats, and I think completely inconsequential in HD -- in a region-free DVD player I can play PAL DVDs just fine on my NTSC TV. There is a little bit of unexpected interlacing especially when there is scrolling text, due to the different rate of fields per second, but it's totally clear and watchable.

Yeah BSG has been suffering from a slightly lessened but still present case of Heroes syndrome, where everyone's roles and allegiances and goals change so often that you can't remember what has happened or who is doing what, to the point that you don't know if the characters even know anymore. Things I thought were defining moments for characters, big turning points in their story arcs, go unmentioned or ignored the next week, while the characters instead take crazy left turns seemingly out of the blue, or bring up something so inconsequential that it hadn't been mentioned for months or years, as a reason for some action. That started for me around the time they split off half of the B cast to go with Starbuck on that freighter on the mission to find Earth, where Gaeta lost his leg, etc. Everyone was arbitrarily hating on each other for reasons which didn't make sense to me despite watching every episode, or bringing up past relationships that I had forgotten about or had written off as being irrelevant after being neglected on screen for so long, etc. Then they all got back from that mission and seemed to forget that even that mission, an event from just the previous episode, had happened (except for the missing leg, which showed up once or twice a few weeks later). As another example, in season two or three or whatever, on New Caprica, Gaeta was a spy running information to the resistance, risking his life for a very specific cause, and I don't know a) if he even told anyone that he was doing that, if his current character even remembers that as part of his past. The lack of defined character arcs and throughlines is really grating for me. The last few episodes have sort of forced the A storyline forward, but even that hasn't been a straight line. The sheer underlying fact that the show is going to end and therefore the plot has to advance seems to be the only consistent motivator at this point... nobody in the story is actually singularly driven to accomplish anything. It's often become an overwrought series of compromises and stalemates which are kind of clunkily bouncing off each other towards the finish line. All that said, I'm still stupidly enjoying the show. There's still enough in there to watch that I find worth catching each week, and I hope that now that they've had a few "house cleaning" episodes, they can clean it up and set a straighter path towards the finish line.

I don't know. I should investigate further I guess. I didn't see any of the large scale maps from TA in there when poking around, but there were team elimination and CTF matches going on. I was hoping someone could definitively answer my question before it was revealed that I didn't do my homework

Quake Live has reminded me that my PC mouse is absolute shit. It's been a while since I cared about such things. It has also reminded me how crap I am at Q3A, and how much I enjoy it despite that. Any word if the Team Arena stuff will make it in at some point? Update: just played some online against random folks and was doing horribly, but at least occasionally killing a dude, when my mouse just stopped working. So, I guess that settles what my next purchase is.

(click the PDA link in the top right there for a more current, less archive-focused version of the forum, using that same formatting)

ja2ke is me

I can't believe someone bastardized Sam & Max with sequels.

Woo I got an invite the other day. I will happily lose to you guys.

But that well-spoken 2K relationsman at the start said it was like Star Wars. I'm so conused.

I'll be watching it whenever it appears on Hulu or the scifi site or whatever, but wooo. Also the smiley always reminds me of Marek, due to him having that avatar forever.

Saw some photos of the ads on a bus... quality! The message of basically "shut up, just enjoy your life and treat each other like humans" was refreshing.

genuinely bummed in the gob. That's depressing news.

Its of course doable, but the time investment, and more importantly, the budget, would be astronomical, to do it with as much variation as Monkey Island 2 had. Many games do limited live mixing and transitions with prerecorded tracks (the example which always comes to mind for me is SSX Tricky, just because it was so overt about it -- cutting the music down to just the simplest drum loop when you were soaring up in the air, mixing "It's Tricky" or whatever into the currently playing song when you were doing extremely well, etc), but its still limited to basically crossfading one recording on top of another at a predetermined time, and hitting loop markers. There are some modern games whose music interactivity can be fairly robust, for sure, but just the sheer scale of the score and its numerous variations and transitions in a game like Monkey Island 2 (and a lot of the nuances which make it really sound great) would be prohibitively hard to achieve these days. Back when "making music for games" basically ended at composing it, and skipped the mixing and editing and bringing in performers, you could achieve a pretty large scale composed score with just a few dudes. Now, that's not so much the case. I imagine most "AAA" game scores which involve even a few live musicians often have more people involved in their production than the entire teams responsible for games of the 80s.

Boo. I fell out of watching CV, but, like most shows which end or get canceled, the news of their demise is what kicks me into gear to catch up. Anyway downloading torrentz. The stuff in the RE special where Ryan was desperately spraying himself in the face with some sort of cleaning supply while eating a giant herb to try and stave off being smacked to death still makes me laugh like some retard, just by thinking about it.

Haha that's great!

Dunno if this was figured out yet, but the UK RSS is wonky because Marek put January 2008 as the date. ¬ ¬ Chris did this last week with the US cast as well and I caught it earlier that time ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬

I played that, it was fun! Chalk

This is a real thread? Huh!

Longer show notes would definitely be something to look into once we get a more real website off the ground. I always enjoyed those when they were prepared for the Shackcasts.

welcome. Sorry that I don't, in fact, recognize you from your username. I am shit with names (and even worse at remembering usernames), but if I met you at another Shack (or similar) event, the odds would greatly increase that I would know who you are. Glad you like the cast, and welcome to the boards.

It's probably "video games," and I'm tired of people claiming that everything around here is as "sarcastic" and "hateful," etc. That's a self fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one. I'd say that at least for me, Thumb is actually extremely hopeful and optimistic. It might be a closet optimist, but hey. Though the forums are often filled with poop and vitriol, I think that one thing that drives everyone forward here and gets everyone excited is the promise and potential that gaming as a whole has to offer. The fact that gaming as a whole so frequently delivers on that promise is a different subject of course, but in the big picture things are always moving forward! Tangent: Fortunately our readership tends to trend old enough that we don't have any console war ridiculousness around here. People seem to come by to just talk about video games, and enjoy video games. There is of course dick waving, but its presented as faux-intellectual overwrought rambling instead of the usual games forum italics-ridden made-up statistics about graphical might and blast processing and such... so our dick waving is still occasionally off-putting and occasionally thread-closingly bad, but its at least slightly more palatable than the norm, and far less prevalent (and definitely more avoidable ).

The first game was built to stand on its own. Bioshock 2 and however many other sequels 2K decides to make may be brilliant, causing you to not just reassess the events of the first Bioshock, but shedding new light on humanity itself... or they could be something significantly less than that. Either way, the first game will continue to stand on its own. Bioshock was built completely outside the context of being a franchise-starter.* It was built to be its own thing. Lost, on the other hand, was obviously built to be an ongoing television series. The first episode of Lost wasn't simply called "Lost," it was called "Pilot," because, um, it was a pilot for a serialized TV program.** Saying that the proposed existence of sequels means one shouldn't bother investing in the first, stand-alone, game is ridiculous. The less goofy solution would be to not play the sequels. Are we gamers really that obsessive and that big of "completionists" that a solid first entry in a series -- which doesn't dangerously cliffhang or other narrative bullshit -- can't be played on its own? Do we for some reason have to drown ourselves in franchise cruft simply because they have the same logo on the box? What the fuck. The games could be good, they could be bad, but holy shit you're not obligated to play any of them besides the ones you want, and in the case of BioShock 1 there's even less OCD crack-addled necessity to play the later ones, because it's self contained. I'm apparently weirded out by this. -- * I don't know if this is a fact -- for all I know some people at 2K may have always been hoping to make sequels -- but the general feeling after Bioshock came out was that people were perfectly happy with that being the only story told in that world. The game wasn't built in a way to incite clamoring for more. In the case of Lost, however, inciting a clamoring for more is all it is built to do. -- ** Yes, I realize that the title of Lost's pilot happens to be a double meaning because it's also a bit about the pilot of the plane. Like 90% of TV pilots are called "pilot" though, so silence.

Yes, fair enough. (I didn't mean to imply that the US was some bastion of quality journalism! With a few highly notable exceptions, its pretty bleak.) And, of course, we love getting worked up over nonsense as well, though it's more the weird worrying-over-fate-you-can't-change "will wild dogs run through the streets and eat your children? who can say! we can't! stay tuned," variety, than the "I can't believe that man was looking at my ankles! all men should be locked up!" variety.