Thrik

She's a woman. All (UK) women love that celebrity humiliation stuff. That picture is totally sick, though. Totally sick. I agree with the sentiment of this comment:

It's because the television has to de-interlace 1080i, which compromises the image quality in almost all cases and can cause motion problems as when something's moving really fast you have to remember that half the lines are from the previous frames. There's a pretty thorough comparison here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/720p#720p_versus_1080i A television with a great upscaler chip (this is a feature most people don't actually factor into their purchase decisions yet is one of the most important -- a lot of people actually buy dedicated upscaler boxes to sit below their TV) will produce a really nice image from 720p, as each frame is a single clean image and it doesn't have to process the hell out of it. It might do less well with 1080i as ironically the high-quality upscaling will expose interlace artefacts even more.

Indeed. There should be no perceptible difference between the two in motion considering how fine the lines are packed together in 1080. Of course, on a technical level 1080p uses exactly twice as much data as 1080p so that's why a lot of slightly less expensive televisions don't support it. Obviously each frame has half its line missing so detail is lost, but with 60 of the fuckers flying past every second nobody's going to able to see the difference as each alternate frame fills in the detail. As the Kuro, yeah that's been on my radar for ages but you're looking at £2,500 for just 42 inches of it. The reason I mentioned the Viera is because it's apparently the next best thing, but enters the market of 42 inches at more like £900. I haven't seen one though and couldn't find one in the local shops. Might have to go on a lengthier excursion and scope out some other shops at some point.

Anyone got/seen a Viera (plasma)? A review of the more recent models said they have superb black levels, which the LCD we have in this house certainly does not (a problem with most LCD televisions it seems, and even the shit backlight adjustment doesn't help much). If you're getting general slowdown everywhere ThunderPeel2001 it sounds more like you have a hardware set-up issue. Various audio/visual set-ups get what I only know as display lag, where the display isn't properly synced for some reason or other and is constantly fucked with to try and keep up. This could give the illusion of a bad frame rate I guess, as frames would be skipped. I'd have a good fiddle and Google to see if you can get to the bottom of it. If anything, it should be smoother as the 360 officially outputs at 60 frames per second as far as I'm aware, and this is a standard all games strive for. As for the 1080i/1080p thing, yeah, a proper full HD television should definitely be capable of doing that. Although to correct you, 1080p does actually have twice the information of 1080i as 1080i takes out half the lines of each frame (every other line of each frame is gone, but it alternates which ones it takes out on a frame-by-frame basis). As long as it's moving this shouldn't be perceptible, and on a HD television there're loads of lines so it's even less perceptible.

Nobody else got it yet? :tdown: :tdown: I did post more on my blog concerning how I feel about the game, but I predominantly need to make sure this fact is out there: Nintendo did good!!

Oh yeah, good call Jake. I'd totally forgotten about that scene. The more I think about how well put together LotR was (IMO!), the more The Hobbit seems unnecessary and the more I kind of don't want to see it. It'll be especially weird if characters like Gandalf have new actors, and the consistencies established during the LotR films such as the cave example above become inconsistent.

Possibly my arse. No idea what it actually means, though.

That's a good point. What about Gandalf? I recall him being quite intimately involved in the book. Is that going to be another actor too or what? Man, complicated business.

lol!

Isn't Bilbo meant to be really young and impressionable in The Hobbit, as opposed to LotR where he's all old and crusty? Genuine question as it's been well over a decade since I read it.

It actually came out around mid-2007 if I recall correctly. I too was really impressed they got it out; I was expecting it to just be a concept and nothing more. It was really funny watching everyone get totally hyped up and saying how they'd definitely get one, and then the thing came out with a massive price tag. I'm guessing not many people have actually bought one apart from the very rich entrepreneurs with cash to burn out there. It is a bit disappointing, though. They had to cut a lot of corners just to get it down to the price tag it's at, resulting in a keyboard that looks much less slick than the original target. Well worth looking at is the rest of their design portfolio, though. Some pretty cool stuff!

Teee, you mad bastard. I'm could have sworn it was explained earlier in the game, though. It's a move from Mario 64 so maybe they just forgot newer people might not know about it.

I don't really get your comment to me, LOPcagney -- not unless I've misunderstood it. I never find myself really motivated to explore any game. I wouldn't dream of saying Assassin's Creed isn't very good just because I have absolutely no motivation to try it at all. Same for Gears of War, which I've still never played. It doesn't make a game any better or worse just because it doesn't immediately attract you with an almighty pull. Granted, classic games often do pull me in immediately such as Mario Galaxy, Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Half-Life (2), etc. However, just as many haven't such as the amazing Beyond Good & Evil. All I was saying is a lot of people haven't even played Crysis, let alone seen what differentiates it from other games. The set pieces, story, and areas you explore? Most people haven't got a clue. It's like saying the entirety of Half-Life 2 is the train station you start in (which as far as interactivity goes isn't too inaccurate).

Yes it did. There's quite a lot to Crysis that nobody's really talked about because they either haven't got the hardware to run the game enjoyably or just didn't get it. There's also the whole frozen island thing, huge alien structures, etc. I mean, the whole game isn't just the demo stretched out onto different parts of the island. Like any FPS, things are mixed up along the way.

In all honesty, I don't even think it's that easy! I've mentioned various times in the past that when new Mario games have come out, people have said they're really easy but I've still found myself getting bummed in the gob consistently while playing them. I think I must just be pretty bad at platform games, yet have the persistence to keep getting through them. I die a lot in Mario games, including New Super Mario Bros. I think the balance is just right in Galaxy. It's tricky enough to make me die plenty of times, especially in the intricate jumping bits (reminiscent of the 'secret' Super Mario Sunshine levels), but not so hard that I can't learn from what I did wrong without dying 10 more times.

Tee, fucking hell. :~

I think the AI isn't quite so bad that it really detracts from the play; rather, it's just a massive missed opportunity. I guess it's difficult to really mark it down for that. To be fair, the AI isn't terrible as far as games in general go (HL2 is an example of pretty sub-par AI, but due to the scripting it seemed fine). It's just that in such a non-linear game with so much potential experimentation it stands out when you try a certain thing and the AI doesn't respond appropriately. Apparently Crysis is a planned trilogy, so they'll hopefully spend more time on non-visual technical stuff next time and more on gameplay/story.

They should make a television series about how comical your gaming experiences are, toblix.

That is clearly bollocks. They should at least look into the IPs that logged into the account and use a bit of classic human judgement to determine the likelihood that two people millions of miles apart are in fact different people. Granted, using a shit password is pretty daft, but not daft enough to deserve potentially being arseholed out of playing hundreds of dollars' worth of games. I suggest you propose that to them. And possible also gaben@valvesoftware.com.

Yeah I agree, the AI really is quite disappointing considering how technically accomplished it is everywhere else. Although it's quite enjoyable cranking the difficulty up onto maximum and attempting to be all Solid Snake with them, the real thing (Metal Gear Solid) has infinitely better AI -- or at least the illusion of it -- which makes for more generally fun stealth play. Not responding to fallen comrades is a particularly lame thing; if that happens in MGS, they immediately raise an alert and have reinforcements all over the area. Seems like Crytek ought to pay more attention to basic advances in AI in other games before progressing their visual technology any further. Weirdly, comparing Crysis to MGS3 seems very appropriate as both put you in the middle of huge stretches of jungle/forest, with use of the land for stealth and whatnot being vital. I really do like this type of game and wish stealth play could be in more games without feeling tacked on. Not that Crysis has anywhere near the storytelling magic of MGS.

Excellent!

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/clashoftheconsoles/

Heh Wrestlevania, yeah it's pretty sad that both Prey and Duke Nukem Forever would have been quite fresh and awesome if they'd come out when they were meant to (although I think DNF hit its peak of looking great in 2001). Same as the 1999 TF2 I guess (practically what Battlefield ended up being), although Valve ironically managed to turn that one around by doing the opposite of innovating.

Let's fire this argument up again! http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=f80a6386-802a-23ad-40c8-3c63dc2d02cb

The bits of Duke in the teaser were pretty bad, but I think that's more down to the animation than the actual graphics quality. The way he moved was just shit and looked so ridiculous after we've had such amazing animation in games recently. Although with that said, it's worth bearing in mind that during the game you're unlikely to really see Duke himself, so it's entirely likely the 'nights spent putting the teaser together' mentioned in the article were in fact just some guys making some Duke animations for the first time. Whatever the case, it is so far off hitting the coolness of the 2001 trailer it's beyond belief. I said before this new teaser even came out that it didn't have a hope in hell of outdoing the 2001 trailer though, so I'm not particularly surprised. That thing combined nostalgia with great music and graphics (for the time) perfectly. I don't think the small clips of the 'gameplay' were too bad. With some polish those bits could actually look great, especially the Pig Cop. I think it's very possible the majority of the teaser was just thrown together as they couldn't think of anything better to do than Duke pumping some weights in a black void.