vimes

He's got a point though when he says Microsoft can't really talk about being successful since neither Xbox nor Xbox360 have been profitable... however outside Nintendo, no one's been making profit on each and every generation of hardware. What I mean is that these are truths (getting clues from the recent data out of blu-ray vs HD DVD market and X360 return rate) in that Microsoft isn't delivering the perfect product and so such facts should be told ... except not by someone like him.

Now, this game and One Piece ultimate Adventure, make me wish I had a Wii.

'Soon I will be absolutely dead' Wished the bored God lying on His Bed. He could remember times when he wasn't as bored not happy, not rushy but surely not so bored Now he sat on his hands that created the Beat Not knowing what to do now that everything fit : the atoms are spinning and peace is everywhere And gunshots in the Church of renown Manchester. Nothing is happening and he is so lazy that he can't even bear to make it all messy And under His foul breath that created the star He curses Man's name who deemed him immortal. He gets mad and gets hot wishing it would be fatal But the sweet dream of death appears so very far So he goes back to bed, and he sits on his palms 'Soon I will be absolutely dead' he repeats with some qualms If you won't pardon the tense, misuses of words and whatnot, please do point them out, it will be my joy to try and find a wierd explanation for it. And now for something nearly completely in french : 'Soon I will be absolutely dead' édicte sans joie, Une paire de lèvres prise d'une effroyable émoi. Seul le silence répond et l'atmosphère se charge 'absolutely dead' revient donc à la charge Mais le silence revient, plus lourd et plus épais Et la tête des lèvres ne peut se réprimer De rougir et d'enfler comme si elle était pleine D'un galon de sang chaud qui courrait dans ses veines Mais ce potiron là est sec et décharné car du reste du corps il est bien séparé. Il erre en roulant le long des plaines humides Seul, flasque, bref, on croirait une amibe. Et cette courge rancie, se désépère chaque jours Chaque heure, chaque minute du sacré mauvais tour Qui, sans bras et sans coeur , l'a rendue immortel Et s'il avait une jambe, ça lui en f'rait une belle Lui, qui d'entre chacun des loisirs de la cours, C'est au rugby à 13 qu'il préférait l'amour.

encore DanJW, encore! Rodi's was fine too, but I give extra credit to poems featuring monsters.

Mmm, I wouldn't know I'm not even through the fifth mission in Blood Money.

The only Agent 47 movie that could ever be brilliant would be one about a guy trying to get a better understanding of a shadowy, legendary figure, only to experience first hand why it acquired the status of a legend in the first place. It would be a bit like Zodiac in that the main character isn't Agent 47 but someone who happens to make the link between the different cases in which 47 is involved. After realizing that a large number of case leads to a same 'person' he would try and track this person's origins down ... only to be killed by him in the end, in a non romantic way. With 47 never really knowing who the guy is ... and his death being meaningless.

Hitman Blood Money : I'm a long way from finishing it yet but what I played simply was simpley 100% brilliant and surprising and all kinds of things.

I'm not familiar neither with Ireland's nor with England's way of life...what's making you stay in Brighton rather than going back to buy a house in Ireland and find a job you hate as much as the one you have/had?

How come you're still whining about the outcome of such 'poll' when you seem to understand that there is no such thing as an objective greatest game ever and that this sort of award only pretend to reflect the taste and opinions of a particular staff ? I mean, you can disagree all you want about their choice but it's fine for what it is so... I don't get your reaction.

I'm talking about Heart of Darkness. And Another World. And to a certain extent, Rez. I can't help but feel these games are wonderful : they are smart, quite unique, inventive and they would make me care for the characters with a string and a piece of wood. But I can't help to think that I would enjoy them more by watching someone else play rather than playing myself. Right now, I despise Eric Chahi. But I think I'll love him again when I'm through the Amigo Village in Heart of Darkness and pass through the triple guards house in Another World. Typically, playing Heart of Darkness made me like Dreamfall even more : I am not a ûber-gamer, I don't like being brought to tears by a challenge. I like the game to unfold before me because I care about it and because I'm willing to move forward. Don't take me wrong, I like difficulty, but overall I like better to feel smart, I like the feeling of knowing that it's difficult, of experiencing failure once or twice before overthorwing the difficulty with an ease that makes me want to shout my victory on rooftops. I like God of War. What kind of dark event in the life of Chahi made him come up with the sweet torture that is the gameplay of Heart of Darkness? Anybody else feels like I do?

I agree with Marek in that less filtering is good : if it means a higher rate of shitty games it also means more games, more diverse delivered regularly once the channel is up... and that's the most interesting part. The disappointing bit to me is still the price of the devkit ( 7500 $US in the worst case) considering there already exists free amateur SDKs for the Gamecube and that Nintendo might not provide to indie developers the same support - QA, etc...- that 'normal' developers get. But even XNA has its own flaws as it seems you can't have people playing your game if they didn't pay the fee for XNA. Still agreeing with Marek, I think that Nintendo should spend most of their effort in organizing the channel because 1- if there is a lot of content they'll need to in order for people to find their puppies 2 - if they want digital distribution to reach out to the non-gaming audience that came to the Wii, they'll need some way to catch their attention

Italo Calvino must be the one authors that I discovered through school's education program official list and that I actually enjoyed reading like it was a personal choice : I discovered The Nonexistent Knight something like 10 years ago and it's one of the few book I enjoy revisiting every other months. If you're into Calvino, I suggest you also read The Baron in the Tree and Dino Buzzatti's books, like La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia(i.e. L'invasion de la sicile par les ours in french) or ll colombre (i.e. Le K in french) ... I couldn't find the english titles, even on wikipedia , but they must have been translated.

The first one is shite, the second one is great but it's filled with jokes referencing current french pop culture... so I'm not sure you foreign guys will enjoy it as much as us froggies.

But he wasn't in his curent business model yet , was he ?

Go look at his blog, you'll find plenty of reassuring info about his business/creative model there.

I think it's a mistake to think that the guy only broke through thanks to Alice : he was a level designer on Quake and Quake 2 multiplayer map ... which were,if I'm not mistaken, milestones in terms of level design for multiplayer environment. Of all his games, I only had the chance to play Scrapland which had a very nice universe and art design but was tedious, boring and whose gameplay mechanisms were definitely not well thought through.

Depending on the day and the status of my account, I could do it. Still, I'll be busy/busy till the end of July.

Let's be serious for a second : I'd say 80% of games on the market are clones,'me-too' and followers. Games targeting a specific audience already exist. Most of them suck or are dull because their 'creators' couldn't really get what the consumers appreciated in the games whose success they try to emulate. These games could be good ones, enjoyable ones, so I wish most of these would follow the general software development scheme, like Blizzard seems to be doing; and yield better result thanks to that.

Am I the only one thinking that what Blizzard is doing right now with Starcraft 2 is engineering a game that is a 100% responding to customer needs? To me, they are crafting a product the way any other software company outside of the game industry would : they are matching the demand without going further than needed. And I don't blame them for it. Frankly, I feel that if Blizzard wanted to innovate and push the envelope in the RTS genre, they wouldn't do it through a Starcraft sequel, they would create a new IP. Because here's the thing : Starcraft(+Broodwar) is one of the few games consider to be un-aging classics and more importantly, it is still massively played at pro level. Only games like Civilization or Quake III can pretend to have such status. It would be utterly stupid for Blizzard to mess up such status by trying to fix what's already working. So Starcraft 2 is 100% in known territory... and I challenge anyone who's seen the gameplay video to tell me they hadn't forgotten Starcraft 1 ever existed before Starcraft 2 :the flow, the art (even the 2D-style blending of different tiles on the terrain),the gameplay everything is so in line with Starcraft that at the end of the video I, for one, forgot that the novelties weren't there to begin with. Of course, they say they are using new technologies, but I don't believe it will change the gameplay, because there isn't any upside in trying to do so. Even the 3D animation tries to emulate the shaky feeling given by the ones in Starcraft.

Wha.. ?

I've always been amazed at how great and how elegant Tron is when it comes to using computer science concepts to build narrative elements... to this day, I think this is the greatest movie ever made about computers.

One of the thing you've got to remind yourself is that everything in physics is approximation. It is good to very good approximation, but it is not 'reality', it is just a description of it. Now, newton and classical physics are strong models because they were checked against carefully set experiments. But you can't do that with climate models : the only thing you can rely on is measuring a set of factors one thinks are important and try to find a relation; you can't try and modify each factor independently to find the relative importance of those. So the process of designing a proper model is very, very long... and maybe not reachable. But thinking what could be avoided (save lives by predicting tornadoes, prevent dust bowl, prevent hunger all over the world,etc...) some people need to make a bet on something incomplete, hoping it will be accurate enough. And I also think that because global warming is well served by exaggeration (see Al Gore's NYC flood scenario, The Day After Tomorrow) it has become the new mean for scientist to get some broad-based support and to educate people on the matter.

I'm not a meteorologist, but I had the chance to study for a little while climate models in the context of a course on new technologies ethics. After a few days spent on the job, I think that the issue with climate is that, despite the fact that we know a lot of good science about it, there's still a huge amount of things that no one understands. The main question currently is "Clouds seem to heavily influence climate. How? " and we don't have an answer for that. Moreover, general circulation model are using 1 - simplification of underlying science because it would be too hard to compute. Hence there are a lot of discrepancies 2 - a system of grids and none of them can stand the test of scale. Up until the 1990's most of those didn't even make a difference between day and night... but this cycle has been proved very important in understanding variations of temperature depending on earth's rotation cycle and the it's position with the sun . More than that, there is not one but three main concurrent climate models and neither of them could retro-predict the mini ice age of the middle age or the 40% of changes in temperature throughout the 20th century. They predicted that the temperature in the troposphere should have risen more that the surface but weather-balloons measured there had been little evolution. They predicted the poles should warm, but most of the areas in Antartica have witnessed significant decreases in temperature. Despite all of that, the UN and the World Meteorlogical Organization said that a mix of the three could yield ' pretty good results' and were "believable". I think that nobody knows what the effect of human activity on the climate has been. The three main sources of methane - which is with CO2 the other element scientists are looking at when considering Global Warming - are 1- natural wetlands 2-animal 3-industry( coal, natural gas, petroleum). So we're not sure. Not scientifically, not rationally. All in all, we're not sure of anything when it comes to climate and the 'it fits' theory Al Gore presented in "An Inconvenient Truth" is freakin' bullshit. But maybe it's like what Terry Pratchett says in one of the Discworld Novel. Granny Weatherwax - a witch - has been called on a farm where several children got suddenly sick. Granny Weatherwax tell the parents a Goblin lives in their well and that it is poisoning the water and thus they shouldn't use it anymore. Granny's assistant tells her that it is not true, that what's happening is that the water is stabling in the well and microbes are developing. Weatherwax says she knows that, but she says the farmers wouldn't understand the microbes thing, that they need a story they can understand. They need a small lie to save themselves. So maybe in the end Global Warming is a lie in itself, but the consequences of people believing it are good. What I know is that we need to reconsider how we consume. I live - and I guess a lot of people live - by using resources they only envision will be available for their own lifetime... some people would say that is a problem because we're fucking it up for lots of people that will come after us. I for one, am trying to improve myself on this topic; not because I think it might profit someone else, but because I still think I will live forever... so lack of natural resources and a fucked up environment would definitely be a problem. But you could also think about the children. Please, someone, would you think about the children?!

So why do you need the picture for ?

What d'you think cats are doing when you're not looking ?