Huz

The following people evidently need a life: 1. Jayel 2. Erkki 3. deadworm (maybe) 4. "Boston low" says the guy posting at 2am

This game takes the piss. I haven't even had one orbit yet. Guhhhh!

I think there is a reward - on Vice City at least. I did try to get as much of GTA3/Vice City completed as possible, but I got fed up and gave up at around the 70% mark. That's pretty depressing. Meh.

Does it have the same music?!

Wing Commander!!!!!!!11 He did a good Wing Commander 'surf theme'. And supposedly some kind of album is in the offing, which would be awesome. El link to original surf theme MP3 - ear.

And walk into in a comical manner. 'Jake' reminds me of Rolf Harris. Sorry.

It has always been el cheapo for such platforms as the Gamecube (or at least, for a long long time). And I've been thinking of getting it for all that time... such a sinner! I picked up Deus Ex in the bargain bin recently, but alas, I have not even started it up yet. Such a sinner!

Would you believe it? This particular query has Google Image Search stumped. Happy birthday anyway, Emmar!

Plus: (dancing elephant) That's elephant dot co dot uk!

In find this smiley disturbing and creepy in most contexts, but this context in particular. For some reason. Just thought you'd like to know.

Did you play "Lemmings Revolution"? Did the full version of that even come out? It was essentially 2D Lemmings again, but just to make use of some fancy new-fangled 3D capabilities, the 2D level was wrapped onto a cylinder shape which you turned around to pan across the level. I played the demo and it was looking good, but I never heard of the full game making it onto the shelves... was it, er, shelved?

You guys have one of the most annoying TV adverts ever. What's that URL again? Shall we reinforce it with a huge dancing elephant? Arrrgh!

I enjoyed it too! I bought it for my mum (who was completely hooked on all the previous Lemmings games), but she couldn't get to grips with it. Whoa, three whole dimensions! Etc. I didn't get very far in it myself, though...

That place might be a bit like that, but I bet they have less sewage in the basement and fewer exploding crates. Black Mesa was doomed even before that whole alien thing, if you ask me. No serious research establishment should have exploding crates just lying around, it's a sign that Black Mesa was being mismanaged. On, near, same thing! Almost. My only knowledge of Chicago comes from watching Due South and ER, so you'll have to excuse me. Why did they replace Ray in Due South? The new one was no good. I stopped watching it after that.

Gunbound. It's like the ancient "tanks" game but more complicated, and multiplayer (online), and you play a strange creature driving around in a strange vehicle with speech bubbles above your head and everything.

You can get a solar-powered GBA charger you know. It takes approximately forever to charge its batteries, apparently. Fact of the day!

Gunbound is excellent, in an incredibly hardcore way, and despite the fact I only played it about twice. It goes nuts if you try to type the ¬ character, which is a major flaw as far as I'm concerned, but other than that it's great. As Penny Arcade so excellently observed, any game where you're a giant lizard in a tank or something has got to be good. Anyway, what's your name in it so I can stalk you? Don't bother being evasive, I'll just keep asking until you capitulate.

On second thought, you live next to the Irish Sea, don't you? Not much of an ocean. More of a sea. A really narrow sea with daily high-speed ferries across it and stuff. That big lake near Chicago, which I can't remember the name of but you saw in Due South every week, usually all frozen over and manky-looking, is probably bigger than the Irish Sea, just less open-ended. Ha ha, you suck too!

Hmmm. You all live next to oceans, or at least, really big lakes. Except hermes. And me. What does that mean? Personally, I live near a major road, a nuclear research place and a big old electricity substation. And a big mysterious tower, except that's being demolished now, because apparently we don't care what the Irish are up to any more. No pictures I'm afraid, but just imagine a big electricity substation and a big road and a big nuclear place with loads of mad "nuclear police" everywhere and you're just about there!

Besides which, even if the pricing is in reach of home users, sales of business-style or productivity software (eg. Microsoft Office or AutoCAD) will be made mainly to corporations who HAVE to buy legal versions or get in lots of trouble. It's not as though widespread pirating of stuff like that is going to cut off their main revenue stream. Which is why pirating games is bad, because they don't have staple buyer type people like Microsoft do.

It presumably has a lot to do with the lifespan of your average game, too. Games must be on the shelves at full price for a year at most, and during that time they have to sell like the proverbial hot cakes to make a profit - hence the industry's obsession with first-week chart positions. After that, either they become extremely cheap (relatively) budget titles or they disappear entirely. Although modern music falls out of favour pretty fast too, there will always be a steady trickle of income in the form of royalty payments for radio play or inclusion on those crappy 'Now that's what I call music 5000' compilations. The same goes doubly for movies, which manage to be screened on TV over and over even if they're terrible, in addition to being available on video and DVD until the end of time. So yeah, that's what tabacco said except with more words.

Hey, neat thread. Write a bit about what you're playing too, bitches! This week is retro week, so I have mostly been eating: 1) Zelda - Ocarina of Time (Gamecube). I am such a trend-setter! Only six years late to the party, but I'm really impressed. OOT has actually stood the test of time and is still very clearly brilliant, even if the dungeons can be infuriating. Today I managed to solve in seconds a puzzle I'd spent hours on last week - go me! However, I am really looking forward to the new Zelda game now. It had better be good. It had BETTER be. 2) Wing Commander 4 (DVD edition). Pah, 6 CDs be gone! I have the ELITE DVD version, subject of many a bidding war on Ebay (into which I was only too happy to hurl my currently over-inflated wallet) with high-res movies and everything! It's great, with a 'proper' cast (well, Mark Hamill and Biff off Back to the Future) and proper sets and proper film and EVERYTHING. 3) Counter-Strike. Damn you Steam, you're shit! STEAMING shit, you might say! Ho ho! Man, Valve walked right into that one. Luckily, the games that lies beneath are worth wading through it for, just about. 4) Blake's 7!!!!!!!!111 OK, not a game, but I've been consuming an unhealthy amount of it lately. Damn it, DVD box sets!

I'm quite selective in what I play nowadays, so I'm of the opinion that if something is worth playing, it's worth paying for. I don't have any moral objection to things like abandonware though, provided a game is genuinely difficult-to-impossible to obtain legally. I'm very appreciative of the great work people on certain 'reputable' abandonware sites do to make hard-to-find classics available to all, and it's a service I'd gladly pay for too - if it wasn't a contradiction in terms.Full disclosure though - I used to pirate Amiga games (and some PC games ) all the time! However, without the sly half-inching of Monkey Island 1, LucasArts wouldn't have had the pleasure of me lining their pockets by buying every single one of their subsequent adventures (bastards). Similarly for Wing Commander, not that it did Origin any good (EA: bastards). So, there you go, a heart-wrenching story of a reformed criminal for you all.

Oh man. Shouldn't they still be locked in cupboards at that age?

A Logitech joystick would be the ideal choice. The base alone weighs more than several starving orphans put together, so bludgeoning someone to death wouldn't even take much effort. With a force-feedback version and some electronics you could set it up as some kind of auto-pumelling machine. And, as for sneaking it into a bar, you could simply stick it down your pants and wait for the "is that a Logitech Wingman Extreme Digital in your pocket..." comments to roll in before laughing gaily and hacking the joker to death. If you took Erwin's broken one you could modify it at will, so you wouldn't even need to take the joystick part, just the base and bottom of the shattered stick. Throw it at someone's face or stab them in the groin with the sawn-off joystick part - the choice is yours!