toblix

I think it's all the fjord.

I've always been interested in Norway? Is it an AFS thing?

Although the game doesn't look very interesting at all, I really dig the visual style and the digital artifacts they've added. I really hope this becomes a thing, like cover based game play, so that I can experience it in a game I want to play.

Where is this videregående?

Are there high schools in Norway?

Ten minutes of gameplay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2NjZtEiosgA#at=467 I didn't find it very exciting. Looks like a linear Unchart-em-up. Wasn't this supposed to be an open-world survival game? Maybe these ten minutes don't exhaustively catalog the entire spectrum of available game-play experiences Tomb Raider™ will have to offer Lara Croft fans, old and new, when it comes out PC and consoles this spring.

MOTHER OFD GOD Does that mean there's an unused connector in my current thing?

I would buy all the things, but I probably can't just plug them into the ION drum brain thing.

I know? Interestingly, by the time I became interested in getting a hold of this game, it was impossible to find. In the end I had to order it from some shady person on Amazon. Anyway, if you ever get the chance to play some pro drums, DO IT.

So, as is typical for you snobs, this game doesn't already have its own thread, even though it'll come out any day now. I'm not sure I'm going to get this. I love huge, polished epic games, and the controls and open world seems tempting (although I doubt it's as awesome as The Lib), but then there's the mention of sudden difficulty spikes and hard protect-the-dude-or-whatever missions, which I hate. So, uh, what do you think?

So I got the Rock Band 3 and keyboard controller thing in the mail today, and holy god damn it pro drums is awesome. I'm using the old ION drum rocker thing or whatever it's called, so it only has the two cymbals, but it's still a million times better when those are separate things. It's so fun I literally play until my arms give out.

I've never fainted (that I know of!!!) but I once got this hilarious nosebleed, and here is its story: I was stupidly trying to do the thing where you sit kneeling on the floor and jump directly up into a standing-up position. So, in the kneeling position I put my arms behind my back, leaned forward and quickly activated what I assumed were the proper set of muscles that would catapult me like a ninja into a standing pose. Instead I jammed my face into the floor, and my nose started bleeding. Maybe you had to be there.

So the power goes out the other day, and when I turn it back on, I'm unable to connect to my NAS, and think «Jesus, what now?» I hook up a monitor to the NAS, reboot it and it hangs partway into the boot sequence. Since I recently lost an SSD to another power outage I figure something got to the SSD in the NAS, and decide to reinstall the OS on it. I wait a day to get a hold of an external DVD reader, burn an installation DVD, reinstall the OS, and get another weird error. The NAS is unable to connect to the DHCP server. I look a the NIC, and there's no lights, and I assume something's wrong with either the NIC or the motherboard. I open up the NAS and move the NIC to another slot and try again – no dice. I check the DHCP server, and it's not showing anything. I configure a static IP on the NAS and am still unable to connect or ping. Then, I realise I should check whether there's a light in the network switch, and there isn't. In fact, the whole switch is dead! Now it all makes sense. The NAS was never dead – the reason I was unable to connect was the switch had died in the power outage. The reason it hanged in the boot sequence was most likely it waiting for a DHCP configuration. Anyway, the moral of the story is: Never throw a network switch behind furniture and assume it'll work forever.

Definitely. The whole ending is like a trap, like the game says to you «Yeah, you found this obvious thing, so what.» Like Fez, completing it seems almost like the wrong thing to do.

To me, that is the service. I don't care about whatever they've got going on behind the scenes, and who they hire to do what, and whether the US version is tremendous – I pay Netflix to get to watch their stuff, and, as I said, I'm happy with the content, but not with the presentation. I've let them know through many channels, so we'll see.In hindsight, I started this thread in one of my many fits of exploding internet rage. I shouldn't be that surprised that a big internet company provides a bad user experience. At least I didn't call the thread «Netflix?! More like Net dicks!» or something.

Just to try to clarify my experience, imagine that a third of the opening screen is covered in a message saying «HEY YOU FORGOT TO LINK YOUR NETFLIX TO YOUR FACEBOOK, » and that every time you start to play a video it has Norwegian subtitles turned on, and sometimes you can't even turn them off. It's not the end of the world, but you would maybe wonder why they can't fix these minor things. It remembers exactly where you left off in all the videos, so why can't it remember that you never want subtitles, right? I totally get how this wouldn't really bother most people at all, much less throw them into a fit of pirating internet rage, and I figure that a good compromise is subscribing to Netflix (and HBO too, then,) and then just torrenting the stuff those services can't provide. So I'll be a nice pirate, like in Monkey Island. Yup, I'm sorry for mixing my general big media hate into this. I guess our situtations are different, as I only have experience (and use for) the web interface, and never need to do anything with the torrented files. In your case, the legal, paid-for option is also the most convenient, which is sweet.

Steam did it with video games. If I could legally download 1080p video files of shows or movies I would pay out of my ass. If someone provided a service that let me get home from work and find nice, legal .mkv files automatically downloaded, I would give them so much money. Of course, realistically speaking, they would have to have some sort of DRM on them, but I bet there are plenty of container formats and open standards available that would allow this. If a part of the Blu-ray standard had been that there would always be a way of just bypassing everything and go straight to the movie, I would buy lots of Blu-rays. Maybe the thing with Steam is that it literally provides an alternative that's better than piracy. Buying, downloading and installing a game on Steam is much easier than having to deal with different no-cd cracks for different patch versions or whatever it is game pirates have to do these days. I literally can't remember the last time I pirated a game, and my Steam library is packed. And that's video games – shouldn't doing the same thing with video be that much simpler to figure out?

OMG I hope they say baboo and the wizard like a million times!!!

Sure, they have some good stuff on there, like House of Cards and Arrested Development, Mad Men, etc. The streaming also works fine – I select a movie/episode and a couple of seconds later, I'm watching it. The user interface is terrible, though, which annoys me terribly, perhaps unreasonably much. It just feels like they're doing the bare minimum to get video on my screen, and nothing more. Yeah, I was being unclear – I definitely don't consider Netflix a big huge evil media giant. In fact, I quite like the thing they're trying out with making television without the television (House of Cards, Arrested Development.) I was thinking more of the other stuff I find myself pirating, like most television shows. There is literally nothing preventing them from letting me buy/subscribe to high quality episodes and movies the moment they're ready, except hundreds of lawyers and suits and distribution agreements and other stuff I don't fully understand but still totally hate. You're right. Content-wise, Netflix are doing some neat things, and most problems people have with their contents is due to the aforementioned dinosaur lawyers and agreements. The closed-alpha-like user interface is still unbelievable to me, though. It's a moot point, though. Whatever I'm "saying" with paying/not paying or pirating/buying/not watching at all, nobody hears or cares – all these companies can do is look at the numbers and try to figure out what's going on. Totally. When I pirate a TV showor a movie, I get a h264 .mkv file I can watch in my bedroom or living room whenever I want, regardless of internet connectivity. I can play it on whatever platform I want, like, say, Linux, and I can use great video player software like VLC or MPC that has tons of nerd settings for video and audio processing. When I buy a TV show or a movie, I get streaming-only video of varying (often lower) quality that I can only play in their shitty Flash applet video player. If I buy a movie on Blu-ray, I get long loading times, forced advertisements and forced «you wouldn't steal a car» videos. It's like the games piracy discussion: the honest customer gets to deal with shitty rootkit DRM, and the pirates don't, because they're pirates. To be clear, I'm not saying piracy is the right thing to do – it's against my principles. I'm never able to stick to my principles though.

I tried checking if there would be a Blu-ray release, but couldn't find one and figured Netflix intended to keep it streaming only.

I'm guess I'm torn between my principles, my desire to watch great stuff, my desire to actually pay for a great service, my frustration and contempt for today's big media corporations and my frustration with the incompetency and cluelessness with which they're approaching the post-internet world, especially contrasted with the extreme gusto and perseverance they're displaying in trying to keep the old, outdated ways of things in place. I want to pay money to watch this great show House of Cards, for example, but I feel like paying Netflix is saying «hey your service is sweet,» when I really hate almost everything about it. They could so easily turn it into a fantastic service, but apparently don't care, and deliver something half-assed. So, I shouldn't pay, and thus shouldn't watch the show. But I want to watch it, and I'm weak. So I do some pirating and some buying and feel sort of okay.

I tried following the story, but after a couple of installments I fell behind and eventually forgot all about it. Story of my life.

Just finished this, and man did it turn into a slog towards the end! The best part was the middle, when I had started to get a handle on the logic of the game and could move from room to room, try a dumb thing, discover something new or see something familiar in a new environment and suddenly realise something fundamental about the nature of the game. Towards the end that faded away, and it became more of a sort of gauntlet of chores to reach the ending.

I've probably never been as immersed in a virtual world as when I played Riven. I love all the Myst games, but Riven stands out to me as the most creepily immersive, especially when the graphics and sound came together to form this other place that felt completely real. Even though the locations were fantastical, the amount of attention paid to realism was incredible. The texture, sound and animation of the various materials was top-notch. Even though the monorail was completely unbelievable and went all over the place and into the sea with crazy energy force rings that made tunnels in the water, it was all grounded in the reality of the world, and you felt the clunking as the car passed between sections, and see the wiring and everything.