Marek

What I've been able to find out so far is that for gold subscription extensions this does not work. Whether it works for MS point cards I don't know, but I kinda doubt it. Otherwise people could buy points in whatever currency is the cheapest and then sell it on eBay...

WHOA THREAD REVIVE! I only got around to playing part of the game this month. I love how it's a constant stream of action movie moments. I'm also a big fan of the "beedeebeedeebee somewhere in the pacific" on-screen text bullshit, which Call of Duty 4 has up the butt. There's a beedeebeedeebee like every minute. Brilliant. And it's great how as opposed to earlier CoDs, the different perspectives from the different soldiers actually tie into one overarching story. Occasionally I'm super disappointed though. The idea of putting you in an airplane bombing people in a village below you through nightvision cam is absolutely brilliant, and it ALMOST had an emotional impact on me. I was ALMOST a little bit uncomfortable. The sort of cold calculated way of dropping bombs on what seem like ants at this distance was very, very interesting. But then the game ruins it, through something that could have been so easily fixed. It just totally took me out of the experience because the guy talking to you on the radio apparently only has about four different things to say. "Get that guy" "Riiight there, tracking." "Light 'em up" "Get that guy" "Get that guy" "Gooood shot! That's gotta hurt!" "Get that guy" "Riiight there, tracking." "Light 'em up" SHUTTTTTUPPPPPPP!!!! YOU'RE RUINING IT, RADIO MAN! :(

Yeah I think it's almost a renaissance era for gaming. I'm so happy with all these smaller games. It feels kinda like the days of shareware again. I'm somewhat disappointed by the Xbox Live portfolio in general though. I mean it's fine but only very occasionally a game comes along that makes me genuinely excited (things like Braid, or soon Castle Crashers). I was hoping XBLA would offer such games more often. PSN is totally owning XBLA in that department, but I'm not ready to buy a PS3. (Although I might get weak when Little Big Planet comes out.)

I fucking love the tagging. Plz continue.

PEOPLE OF IDLE FORUMS. This is a message from your friends at Thumbs Homeland Security. As you are no doubt aware, spam bots are secretly living amongst us, constantly planning to strike. This madness must end. So yeah, we need to upgrade vBulletin. This will take place sometime in the next couple of days, when I have the time. So... stuff might happen. Hopefully nothing gets too badly destroyed. Woo!!! P.S. .

Oh erm yeah our templates are mega outdated and I have no idea how this will affect anything, nor whether anyone can be bothered to fix any templates.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand we are back.

HOW DO YOU KNOW ABOUT OUR PLANS? Are you one of them??

Yeah TV shows have gotten so much better in the past years, probably due to DVD and online sales, and people getting generally better at following highly serialized shows or nonlinear plots (due to internet etc.). Even a pulp show like, say, Burn Notice, which kinda harkens back to mindless shows like Nightrider, Miami Vice or The A-Team, is actually kind of good really.

After hearing people rave about In Bruges I saw it yesterday and I'm sorry to say I thought it was a piece of shit. There's a few good ideas in it (I really like the premise), but the script seems like it was written by a screenwriting student, the dramatic elements are far too obvious, the jokes are bad, the dialog extremely on the nose, the metaphors/symbolism hamfisted, etc. etc. Apparently I'm the only person on the planet who thinks this but, really, the movie nothing to write home about.

I saw the first two episodes yesterday. First one was... meh? Second one... I was getting into a lot more. 3rd one will hopefully reveal if this series is good or meh overall.

Have stuff to do for AG first. Hold the fort...

Whoa this is good. Haha

Regarding the pub quiz, I think we were severely out-nerded on a lot of knowledge questions involving exact release years of ancient arcade games and such, but we did well on most general questions. There was also a music / sound fx round that we did pretty well in. (Guess what the sound clip is from.) There was a drawing round in which we had to draw a screenshot from a fictional game about Gordon Brown. Fortunately we had John G and Rusalka on the team, and a lot of good ideas, so we totally pwned it up. It had an epic Gordon Brown with a suitcase with money and a huge gun, facing an angry mob carrying signs. The judges gave us 6 out of 5 points which was quite encouraging. But then we learned another group had gotten 8 of out 5 points for something completely shitty, and realized that the judges are full of shit. We also totally pwned the plasticine round, but were given a far too low score for that as well. Yeah. I believe Spaff has photos. So in the end Eurogamer won. And we weren't even amongst the top 5. That said our effort was sabotaged by DanJW claiming that the female character in Mario's first game was called "Rachel", various people claiming the PS3 had a lower carbon footprint than a Nintendo Wii, and me saying the national anthem that EA recently got wrong in a game was Serbia instead of Northern Ireland (lolz).

Idle Thumbs will be representing at the pub quiz......

I would offer crashing options but sadly my apartment will be barely habitable this week. I probably won't be at the conference but I'll be partaking in the boozing & schmoozing.

I may be in Prague then. Have to check...

I'll be attending some of the post-conference activities for both of these (and maybe Develop itself also) so let me know when you're around.

Yay! I recently moved to Brighton so I might be up for a London meetup. Although to be honest Brighton is so fucking awesome that I haven't been tempted to leave it for anything yet. So, erm, come to Brighton and beers are on me.

Wow, that gives me lots of nostalgic flashbacks. I suggest that you gradually empty your entire Idle Thumbs design folder onto this thread.

Haha yeah I noticed that recently as well. Ohhhhh jokes.

Yeah I got this too. He was administratively raped immediately but we are looking at some better spam protection measures. Spaff and I were planning to install it this weekend but we didn't get around to it due to playing the Call of Cthuhlu tabletop rpg . But hopefully soon.

Let's have a thread about how amazingly incredible this documentary series is. I heard about it quite a few times but only just watched the first episode. My jaw dropped/unhinged a bazillion times. Also saw an episode of The Blue Planet (an earlier documentary by the same producers) with Spaff last week which basically had ... like ... Lord of the Rings style epicness except it's actually real animals living in nature in and around the sea. Completely pwned. Yeah so watch that.

You can make a creature without legs and it will move like a snake or snail. ThunderPeel, maybe you should play around with the editor a bit more, because there's a lot of possibilities. There was definitely a great degree of hype around Spore but even so the editor is quite amazing.

Tigh's confession scene. Apollo & Starbuck in Adama's quarters, talking about the young replacing the old and shit Landing on Earth Everything else I'm not a fan of how this season went. I'm not necesserily disappointed with what happened, but more with how. It's like before the season started the writers just filled up a giant plot bucket to the brim and just kind of brashly poured it out over all the episodes. A lot of things kept happening but they were often poorly explained or motivated, or even just reversed in the next episode(s). I dunno. Not a big fan of this season. But I still watched all of it, and was reasonably entertained.