Marek

GAIUS BALTAR :eek::eek:

Yeah so EA, hated by everyone. They destroyed some perfectly fine developers in the 90ies and they're notorious for releasing incrementally updated sports games every year. BUT ... I think EA is actually doing not so bad right now. I believe they've realized they need to be better in a lot of areas to become as succesful this generation. (The PS2 has always been EA's magic money tree, but those days will be over soon.) Have you seen NBA Street Homecourt? I am buying that game. I don't usually care about sports games, but that's one sexy game. I love the art direction and the animation (watch some videos of it to see what I mean), and from what I hear the gameplay is great too. Plus it seems it manages to be "street" in a genuinely cool way, without being extremely retarded. I'm looking forward to SSX Blur for the Wii, also on the EA Sports BIG label (Chris had a good preview of it at Shack a while back). Also wouldn't mind playing some Tiger Woods for the Wii if it's implemented well. Fight Night Round 3 was kind of cool. Then there's Army of Two from EA Montreal, a game focused entirely on co-op. Might be great, who knows. Also Spore. Also Sims Wii (led by Robin Hunicke), Simcity DS, Theme Park DS, various unannounced new IPs at EA LA (led by Randy Smith, Doug Church), etc. I think EA right now is kind of like Microsoft after they'd released the first Xbox. They deserve a chance to be possibly loved again, if they play their cards right. WHO'S WITH ME????

... is a new control mechanism.

Sounds like a plan. Let's do it.

It's almost like the designers of Oblivion didn't assume players would be taking full inventories of loot from every cave / quest / etc. I always load up with stuff and cash it in with my favorite merchant.

Uhh. Wow. Yes...

Heh I had this when I went on holidays to Hungary two years ago. I was seeing HL2 everywhere.

That trailer has the two "real" movies inside the movie. The movie will indeed have "fake" trailers in between, but none of them is in the real trailer (one of them is directed by the same dude who did Shaun / Hot Fuzz).

I saw it on sunday and I totally felt that HL2 mood too. In fact, I wrote a little post about it.

THUNDERBIRD. Although one downside to Thunderbird is that if Outlook users in your office send attachements the wrong way they'll show up for you as winmail.dat instead of normal attachments. But since you are being given the choice, I assume this isn't a problem at your company.

I wonder if you (and other people) are just saying it's "tacked on" because a GameCube version also exists and therefore have the benefit of comparing the two and/or are assuming that the Wii controls were somehow determined at the very last moment in development, which was not the case. I really don't get the "tacked on" criticism at all. Clearly there's no Wiimote bonus controls randomly thrown at it or anything... it's got a completely different control scheme in every possible way, and it was designed specifically for the Wii.

He's gone now. Replaced by a newer model.

Also offtopic: ShackNews - Irrational Games Developing X-COM Title?

In terms of number of games you may be right, but measured by popularity I think it was really the PS2. There's shitloads of casual gamers playing singstar, buzz and eyetoy. Those games are more like the touch generation games and less like mario kart / mario party.

I think there's almost nothing to talk about. Remember the first six months after the launch of the DS? The same discussions were had. Except DS had even less titles then. It will be a non-issue for Wii in six month, probably even earlier. The defining feature of the system remains the controller, not a focus on party gaming. Lest we forget, up until Wii the PS2 was the party game console (Singstar, Buzz, etc.) and Peter Moore said not so long ago that Microsoft will commit itself to bringing broad appeal party games to the 360.

Uhhh HTML with PHP in it? Aren't there actual HTML/CSS template files with custom tags in it for inserting the contents? No PHP that I know of. But yes the image uploader is a bit shit.

Wordpress is way superior to Blogger and very easy to use, so be sure to consider that as well.

MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

It seems so. Even though Tim is often pretty shy on stage, that's very exciting to me.

[A tangent from this thread.] I'm further into Zelda now and in terms of moment-to-moment gameplay it's the most refined I've seen in years. There's such a gentle flow to the action and the puzzles that you hardly notice how much areas you've already covered in the game. Structurally it does have its problems. In the beginning after I'd done the tutorial stuff in the village, I was really looking forward to just exploring the woods and discovering some more caves and other straight adventuring. Then along comes a 30 sec cutscene, in which: That's way too much all at once. I would have loved it much more if twilight creatures and areas started bleeding into the normal world over a period of time, and all those plotpoints were more spread out. The quality of the gameplay itself made that bump in the road completely tolerable, but had the gameplay been any less brilliant that cutscene would have made me super sad. I'm about to go into the second dungeon now. It's a blast.

Wii version has superior controls and widescreen. GC version has good controls and 4:3. I'd say go for the GC version if you want to play it now.

Gotta agree with lobotomy. When I visit my family, I take my laptop with me and I'll just have all my files, programs, music, etc. in my bag with me. So easy. It's also great simply when you're on the road. But I use its portability mostly inside the house. I can put the laptop on my desk, or sit in my beanbags, or browse the web while I'm lying in bed, or take it to the kitchen (where it serves as a jukebox and IM terminal while I'm cooking). In fact I'm typing this message from the toilet. OK that last bit was a lie. But holy shit you can take it anywhere. And if I want to watch something on a big screen, I just connect it to my TV.

It totally depends. Personally, I won't be writing anything for Thumb, as I've got way too much on my plate already. But I know some of us want to write something.

Stay tuned . . . . . .

That's totally amazing. Also a bit bizarre since Dave Gilbert used to write for AG etc. and ... well ... now he's going to be nominated at the GDC awards. Woo! A small army of thumbers and former thumbers will be at GDC so that can definitely happen. I suggest you get in touch with Jake! Oh man GDC will own so hard. I will die of pleasure.