Spaff

yeah, having seen it, it's a little ambiguous to say the least.... i guess we'll see, and hope more Rab and Ryan will exist soon

i like your cards

there is now...

oh we're all consolevania ppl here anyways, i played the demo of this game and it was horrible

someone's not invited on the podcast ¬¬

I wanted to kinda talk more about stories in MMOs cus listening back I don't think I explained myself in a particularly clear way, or with any depth, the subject is something an entire podcast could easily focus on… anyways, let me just add the following opinions of mine… it got kind of long, so long that i can't spend any time going back to make sure I'm not speaking out of my arse too much, so erm, maybe skip it if you dont give a shit Story based games are generally a very single player experience… sure you can share that by say, playing grim Fandango together, or taking turns to play through Morrowind, but both of those games are primarily designed to be single player, they live in the single player box. This is kinda true for books, movies etc too… kinda. With multiplayer games, in my experience at least, story will often either take a back seat, or be forgotten entirely; In a death match / PvP game against other players for example, story is irrelevant, and when playing co-op through say, Halo, or errr Diablo, the story is there and entertains you, but in-between the cut-scenes and minor pieces of mission briefing, the *reason* you are playing is probably not to drive along the story, or unfold epic plot lines with twists and turns, not scripted moments of cinematic genius - it's the experience of playing side by side with your friends, and the things that happen, the war stories or the epic moments where you took on 500 guys, become your story. The actual story becomes more of an excuse for it to be happening, rather than a reason. Adding more in-depth story experiences was the continually cited reason that co-op, once a staple gaming mode, completely disappeared from games for a number of years and had to be hacked back in by the users… Half-Life or AvP for example were too heavily scripted towards single player, and to allow two players to be in that experience would break it. With MMOs, I think that magnifies again… WoW has an epic story line, tons of lore, masses dialogue all there too enjoy and keep you entertained, but I find that as soon as you group with people to quest, the actual story of why you need 10 bear claws or to kill some giant crab thing kind fades away a bit, and becomes second seat to adventuring, exploring, battling and playing with others… the more people that join, the less the reasons matter. When I'm enjoying the story, and reading all the dialogue, taking it all in, I'm far more likely to be playing solo. This becomes even more prevalent when you start doing 5,10, 25 or (god help you) 40 man instances, especially after the first time you've done them,… In WoW you might repeat a dungeon over and over, sometimes too many times yes, but often you're doing a dungeon or Raid a number of times because you want to repeat an awesome experience you had, challenge yourself in new ways, or maybe play it on a harder difficulty. The game even makes you repeat them to earn various loot, tokens, cred, whatever – I'm not saying that's great gameplay necessarily, but it is working, and tons of people love it. Now don't get me wrong, the lore and story of WoW turns me on, I love it, but it's more something that pulls me into the world than something that drives my playing. Additionally, the story in WoW exists around you, but the main lore is not pushed along by your actions very often, but more by world events. Some people get annoyed at this, that the player should be the focus of the story, slay the dragon and win the day – but in this kind of game you're one of many awesome warriors, the real heroes take 25 top level guys to take down. This is reflected in stories like Lord of the Rings, where may heroes exist at once. So when this 'fourth pillar' of story is discussed by the Old Republic folks, it makes me nervous. I'm a huge fan of KoToR but I don't see how they can implement a storyline of that magnitude, with world changing events, nine times over, into a massively multiplayer experience, without it being detrimental to the multiplayer aspects, or making them pointless entirely. Will the henchmen type characters re-enforce that? – when I've seen them used previously they become a replacement for other players, when you need to solo and turn a multiplayer experience into a single player one. Guild Wars sues this solution, with hire-able henchmen and even heroes with stories that follow you around. They also use instancing so that if you want to help someone out who isn't as far along the story as you, you can join in their game, as it shapes the world around the party leader .Sadly though this isn't a solution, because then it means your game isn't an MMO anymore, it's just an MO – Guild Wars is mo more an MMO Than Diablo II really as in GW only the towns are persistent and can contain more than a party's worth of people. Sooooo all this makes me boil it down to what I say in the pod cast itself, "meh ignorance." Hopefully though the reason they are banging on about this, because they really have worked out a way to do this well that no one has seen before…. That would be an incredible achievement, and I hope they make it, bring us some innovation! No really, I may love my WoW and how it works, but I'm not totally close minded to change, and hey, I friggin' love KoToR, so bring it on. I'm very skeptical though. Aaanyways, this is a subject that we should discuss over a beer some time (or several), it would be easier face to face, it deserves a conversation rather than a one sided essay, and we could have a good old rant, so come and join me in the pub. J

my amp goes up to 100 so 13 seems fairly quiet ¬¬ ok ok i'll investigate, but it should be just fine....

video gamesvideo-gamesvideo%20games.com ?

one of my favourites Ecstasy helps us deal with drunks, say cops http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24149828-1248,00.html

I've kept this on my ipod for the last 3 years for emergency full throttle viewing

we learn something every day.

even if you dont give a fuck about animals, if you are eating intensively farmed, shit fed, rank, badly butchered, water filled 'meat' stuffed with antibiotics and random growth hormones then your food is going to taste like shit and poison you. so if you can only think of yourself, then you have the same priorities anyways, intensive farming is still bad I love eating meat, but I'd never cut down on the amount i spend to get the shit stuff, becasue i dont want to eat crap, AND animals don't deserve to be shoved into little crates where they can't move around... liek the matrix but with pigs!.. maybe the piglet Neo will rescue them all. ¬¬

did your enthusiasm remain for this game? Anyone else played it?

we made that site... not the video though hehe.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/article1228152.ece;jsessionid=F0AA8BFEB23189F845B8821F465EC29A?postingType=complaint&parentId=1229433&mode=thanks&postingId=1229668

stop de-railing the thread you swine! p.s father ted is a million billion miles way from the IT crowd, how did graham lineham become so... tepid?

hahaha. oh yeah Nonce Sense.

entirely accurate.

JamesM - cookdandbombd seem to basically hate everything that isnt Wayne Carr, so ignore them

No theyre both from the special... http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=y7jVnrfoZD8 alone in space with the monster 00:40 Dressed as a school 02:32 see you remember them from decline, which is the best epsiode, which means secretly tou like the paedo special

or the paedophile dressed as a school.... the paedo sent into space with a child accidentally left on board being 'the one thing we didn't want to happen' the false advert break about paedophile island and the paedo files which cased a billion complaints to channel 4 because they thought it was real. etc aaanyway

I wonder if the employer in question was Blizzard

haha no instead is has the amazingly underplayed and dramatic intro text, which is so tiny on the screen you can hardly see it, whcih then explodes in a tiny mushroom cloud, and then continues to animate for about 20 seconds too long http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=y7jVnrfoZD8 (1:15 in)

false, well to me anyways - if anything I'd say it's even more effective than the others, especially for the way in which the British media took hold of it and made it headline news, basically hammering every single point discussed into people's faces in exactly the way it was surely intended to do, in a horribly ironic way. I dunno if that's true, I think it might pre-date them, but also the version set to music with Osymyso was awesome. false. please don't make me sad! - this news makes me happy, it's the first good news of 2009 for poor appendixless, jobless me! Don't forget his horrible role in that dreadful fucking shitstorm of an embarassment - the IT Crowd, ugghhh it makes me shudder. Anyways... my wrongs, which is maybe 5/6 years old now, was based on a blue jam monologue, and doesnt work as well as it did when it was just a rambling set of words falling from chris's mouth. Nathan Barley suffered from not having Morris in it at all (well he's in one tiny background video) and coming too many years after taking the piss out of new media was no longer amusing... Also, if you watch the pilot, it was clear they had a different initial plan, to make Barley the hated 'cunt' that he was designed to be, and to make the character of Dan look down on them and be generally better than all these 'cunts'... but for some unknown reason they made it so that you empathised with Barley. That was a game changing folly.... The failure of Barley is similar in my mind to the My Wrongs thing, in that part of the genius was in the over the top way it was described in words, which was then lost when filmed - the details of Barley's cunthood were described in such detail, specific model numbers of hardware he had, or brands of clothing taking up much of the description of the episodes... See, there's no way to convey that properly in a visual way... ( read the rest of the original Charlie Brooker / probably Morris efforts from TV Go Home here: http://www.thegestalt.org/simon/cunt/ ) AAAaaannnyways, I welcome the return of Morris, and I'd like to see what he has to offer us. He's been an incredibly important part of my life for many years, and I don't think this is going to be another Brass Eye or On The Hour, but I am excited none-the-less.

just interrupt