Marek

Who'll be at GDC in March? The conference is not open to the general public, but some Thumbites have game industry jobs or other reasons to be there, so I thought I would ask. If there's a few people, maybe some kind of Thumb-Meet could be done. On the other hand maybe I'm grossly overestimating the number of people who'd go there. Enlighten me, please!

There was a 2 month gap between episode 1 and episode 2. There will be one month gaps between all episodes until episode 6.

It's amazing how 95% of our forumship (and I assume the majority of our readership) came from AdventureGamers.com and Mixnmojo. I guess we did a poor job promoting the site everywhere else on the nets.

Always touch a dic with your index finger.

Hello thar! I am looking for blogs: About Japan That have pictures in them That have an RSS feed It can be about anything Japan related. Japanese food, gimmicks, toys, films, people, buildings, whatever. Why? Because I need a list of them for a project at work. So: if you have anything in your bookmarks folder that meets these criteria, post it here!! Kthnxbai

The content itself may be CC but apparently using flickr's RSS feeds or API for commercial purposes requires $$$. I was told by higherups to avoid flickr for this reason but I didn't actually verify this.

Engadet thinks so. If this is true, it'd be tempting to sell my current xbox before the masses get wind of this. My xbox 360 also has the older, noisier cd drive (the one that sounds like a Boeing 707 preparing for takeoff).

Thanks for the help! Sadly I can't use flickr feeds as there's a licensing issue. When the project is done I'll post a link here so you can all see what this was for.

Oh, as an aside: Spore is often mentioned as the one killer game for the PC, but it is going to be multiplatform. Even more multiplatform than the regular multiplatform game. It starts with Spore on PC, but handheld and mobile versions will be able to use the same universe. (If they're doing handheld tie-ins, which has more or less been confirmed, they're clearly doing consoles too.) Just saying, don't see Spore as something that's PC exclusive.

I used to be 100% a PC gamer. When I played console games, it was only on other people's consoles. But I have gotten completely fed up with PC gaming. The upgrading, patching and messing with DirectX or video card settings is no longer worth it to me. Also, increasingly, I can get the kinds of games I love on the PC on consoles. Even the controls of console RTS games are improving. I played a bit of Battle for Middle-Earth II on the 360 and after half an hour, I no longer felt like I was missing the mouse. If I were playing RTSes super competitively or on the hardest setting I would definitely want to play them on the PC, but for regular games, a gamepad works just fine. The occasional new Half-Life 2 episode or MMO aside, I see the PC mainly as a platform where I can get a lot of relatively low-spec indie (or quasi indie) games like Sam & Max, Defcon or Surpreme Commander. The consoles have outlets like XBLA, XNA, e-Distribution Initiative, and potentially WiiConnect24, but those are still closed and controlled. PC will remain the platform of choice for indie games for many years to come. Sadly there's still too little of it, and not enough aggregators. I was hoping Manifesto Games would take the lead but I have come to completely hate their attitude. "SUP COMRADS, EA are capitalists!!!!! Buy indie games AND FIGHT THE SYSTEM."

Yes. Also, if phone interfaces are going to be this good from now on, I see a very healthy future for alternate reality games and mobile MMOs. Sadly the rumors of iPhone having a GPS receiver weren't true.

I've got Cialdini's book right here on my bookshelf. I remember the anecdotes were sometimes longer than they had to be, but hey, you can always skip a little. I read excerpts of The Cathedral and The Bazaar in college but I never read the whole book. I'll remember that one. (On the off-topic of books, I have to tell you to take a look at The Art of Looking Sideways. You can read about it in detail on Amazon, so I'll just say it's the best book I own. It's unrelated to any of the books previously mentioned here but I'm pretty sure anyone here would like it.)

I also just read The Long Tail, and will read the Selfish Gene after The Tipping Point. I've set my mind up for total owning.

It's called the tipping point.

A friend of mine saw the iPhone announcements and said he'd never buy one because of fingerprints or smudges on the screen. Then he saw a line saying "just wipe the screen with your sleeve" from an NYTimes article and said "see, what if you have just one bit of sand on your sleeve? you'll have a scratch". This I do not understand. (Hear hear Jake.)

Yeah his blog rules.

Excellent. "Customers can add Mr Cloud as a friend on their Wii, and then beam over their Mii using the Wii's built-in send functionality. The Mii-shirts (GBP 19.99 / USD 35) are custom-printed and dispatched within a few days."

It could be a trailer for one of the movies inside the movie or it could be a trailer for one of the trailers of a fictional movie inside the movie, since Grindhouse is two movies with fake trailers in between. Did I just BLOW YOUR MIND?? I'll go check it out now. Also it's worth mentioning that one of the fake trailers will be directed by Edgar Wright.

I wouldn't call the PS3 ugly. But it's not great looking either. While the PS3 looks great in pictures, it looks bad in the living room. It starts as a shiny new thing but quickly becomes a black block with lots of dust and fingerprints on it. Also the curves make the PS3 look fatter, whereas the curves on the Xbox have a slimming effect. Xbox 360 is much better designed overall. The inward curves, the green circle, the color scheme, it's all very consistently done. The only part of the design I really don't like is the disc drive. The metal/chrome material they used for that looks terrible somehow.

Yeah the sets need to be expanded. I also needed a patch for Saul Tigh.

... has been possible for a while now thanks to Bootcamp. But has anyone tried it with Parallel Desktops? I assume it loads both operating systems into memory, so does that hurt the performance much? Basically: can I play Half-Life 2 with settings maxed out (as has been shown with Bootcamp) on an Intel Mac using Parallel Desktops?

I call moneyhat on this. No, not that one.

SiN: the thing that's giving me hope is the reports of equal or better performance of everything besides games through Parallel so far. I don't know how they do it but apparently it doesn't slow down much at all.

I have a hunch there'll be a few more weird/trippy locations in later episodes.

Terrible. Makes it look like one of those gamer PCs that tries too hard.