Thrik

Hee man, Sky are such bastards for that. :~ Weirdly, Sky customers get Virgin 1. I guess Virgin aren't as foolish/petty as they look.

I thought the Colour of Magic TV representation of Cohen was pretty cool.

Hee. Is any British success not converted to American these days? ; Weird how it doesn't tend to happen the other way round.

Yeah, the timeline is good and a must-read if you didn't quite get the details — but definitely don't go too far, as the plot continued in Episode One and Two is great. One of my favourite details is the fact that the oceans are being drained, which is something I didn't notice at all when I first played it through but was all "Oooh!" afterwards.

You're mad and insane.

Yeah, it's awesome. I never actually saw Life on Mars though, so have just been liking it on its own merits — of which there are many. I coincidentally started watching Life on Mars today, and two episodes in I'm really enjoying it. It's definitely got more focus on the external stimuli thing, which is pretty cool. I guess they didn't feel they needed to do so much with that in Ashes to Ashes.

I don't know about the Hogfather, but apparently Terry is pretty heavily involved with this and had a lot of input regarding essentially every aspect of the writing, including turning The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic into a single story (the film covers the events of both). If anyone's going to be able to make the humour transition properly, it'll be with his help.

Teee. Yeah, this is more prominent than I've seen before. Sky itself is good, though. Sky+ has become invaluable, and the channels always have programmes I like on such as Lost and of course the movies. I wouldn't ever be inclined to say Sky sucks or anything.

I think waiting a while and playing all the great games in a relatively short space of time is a great plan, Rodi. I should clarify that my comment above was restricted to the release of new games; that is, there haven't been many exciting releases per year. I haven't actually gotten around to playing most of them until late 2007/early 2008, and I've been having a great game ploughing through games I never played/finished such as Black & White 2, Company of Heroes, Episode One, Episode Two, Command & Conquer 3, BioShock, Mario Galaxy, Twilight Princess, and more. Of course now I've gotten all excited by these I'll inevitably be disappointed by relatively few awesome new releases in 2008 — as always. Then again, with Smash Bros Brawl, Mario Kart Wii, Metal Gear Solid 4, and maybe Battlefield 3 to look forward to, it may not be so bad.

To be honest I'm not enjoying any more or less new games that I have been for a few years now. There's not been a consistent stream of superb games in ages; there're only a few gems I can point to in any given year.

Yeah, these things are mental. I can already imagine the future. These things become really big and really strong for carrying various cargo (their intended purpose), and then either: a) Some AI so intelligent we've had to confine it to a computer (ie: no body) for our own safety manages to implant its own mind into loads of them and goes on a killing spree Drivable, ultra-strong ones are produced based on the cargo-carrying versions, which results in some crazy mech action An interesting fact for Metal Gear Solid fans is that the guys producing these things are largely funded by DARPA. (Just click this if you're a bit wierd and didn't play/like MGS.) It's almost like Hideo has a crystal ball buried up his arse!

There's really not much in it between providers other than the financial bottom line. A lot of the well-known providers really overcharge, making you pay for things as minor as name server changes and transfers. I've been using Dreamhost to do domains for years now. It's $10 per year for a .com (£5), and they also throw in free privacy which means your address and whatnot isn't displayed on the public whois database. This is something pretty much all other registrars charge for. Theoretically you could of course just put fake info in, but that can lead to your domain being revoked if someone hates you enough to point it out to domain authorities (FYI!).

Safe mode should do it.

Presumably so they're squishy and thus can be squeezed out with little more pain than a shitty, disgusting, vomit-inducing taste.

Hee. I'm so glad mine grew properly. Sounds horrific!

I was getting pretty worried about the lack of new content for TF2, seeing as Valve is usually very generous with their post-release stuff. Looks like it was unwarranted though as apparently we can soon expect: A capture-the-intel version of Well (within a few days) New maps: Goldrush (similar to TFC's hunted, except the civilian is now a mine cart that must be 'pushed' by being in its vicinity) and a remake of TFC's Badlands Two new unlockable weapons for every class, based on achievements (of which there'll be around 35 per class) -- presumably so newbies aren't overwhelmed by too much equipment Great for those nutters of us who're still playing regularly like Thrik, Metallus, Huz, LucasTones, and bgbennyboy! Play with us and be happy.

Oh. I haven't opened Steam in a couple of days due to general knackeredness. :~ When it comes to Valve I don't really mind their slipped releases. While it is irritating, I don't think any other developer since LucasArts has consistently churned out immensely high-quality stuff for so long. If they need these delays to add last bits of polish or to resolve last-minute bugs, I'm OK with that.

Eh? What date did they miss?

Hee. The saddest part is that he probably has already with his other millions. :~ Rich bastards. :tdown: :tdown:

In all fairness, it's probably great if you're a multi-millionaire. I'm guessing there is simply no finer home audio-visual experience, and it's probably better than a lot of cinemas too. And you know films are at their best at the cinema. I'd definitely want all the lights dimming to make the room dark like a cinema though, with floor lights so you don't go stumbling all over the $1000-a-piece equipment. I'd be more than happy with an equivalent screen and a fraction of the speakers.

I've been seeing that fucker for months. It's come up so much that I've been starting to think it's trying to tell me something. The reality is that it's probably associating our site content with 'thumbing it in'.

I wouldn't imagine it's real-time. That's probably the kind of implementation you'd expect to see in a CG movie. I'm not really impressed by motion capture stuff so much. That's kind of what movies have been working on for years, and games are inevitably going to be significantly further behind on the raw polygon and shader side of things. I'm guessing Quantic Dream are aiming to have real-time stuff that isn't completely motion captured. For example, their eye video looks like it could be the product of a player simply looking around like you might in any FPS. While you could probably match that with motion capture, it's nowhere near as impressive to me as doing it procedurally. It's kind of like how Half-Life 2's facial system is all done procedurally, based on the sound files it's given. They could probably come up with some great stuff if it were all motion captured, but then they'd have to do that for every voice sample they use instead of just having one system can process any. Granted, their first Heavy Rain video kind of clashes with this assumption seeing as that was motion captured up the arse.

But do you guys even visit any mainstream forums?

Yeah, that's my main criticism with Episode One too. Fortunately Episode Two makes up for it by throwing nothing but new environments at you.

OFN is pretty common from what I've seen. It stands for 'old fucking news'.