Twilo

All those ships have Ion Drive engines which are totally rubbish in real life

There's so much wrong with the shuttle program, it really ought to have been abandoned in the 70's before too much was spent on it :/ There's nothing terribly "reusable" about it, between part replacement, the booster rockets and fuel tanks, and the months upon months of turnaround between launches, it's not exactly what it was planned to be. Still, it's the best they've got, even if they only have 3 now.

If no such term currently exists, may I propose: Englishki! If anyone of Slavic descent cares to contest that... BRING IT ON

So judging from that graph, the Atari, Snes and Megadrive were responsible for elevated crime rates! THERE'S BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS

Outstanding! Another couple of years of work and we'll have it looking like the real thing, baby!

Since when did prudent financing and common sense ever stop us from blowing cash on crap we don't need? Since never, that's what! I'll buy four!

Imposter!

That's more or less exactly what I said. As for porting engines and things, Epic seems to have managed it (though I don't know how optimised it is for the 3-core xbox, I suspect not very)

Well this is certainly not true. Multithreading is something that computers have been doing for years upon years now. The main difference with multicore or multiple processors is that the threads can run on seperate processors rather than sharing one between them. It's not possible through anything other than getting really deep down onto the coalface (eg assembly) to arrange what order threads will run in or when they'll finish. Running 2 threads on one processor is exactly as predictable as running 2 threads on 2 processors, and it's a problem that programmers have dealt with for a long time now. Also, you're going to learn multithreading pretty soon, I can almost guarantee it. The main difficulty is later on in the lifetime of these machines when people want to be very efficient about what they're doing (most of the early game aren't going to be using all the cores all the time) in which case you need to be really careful about what threads are running where and for how long.

And I think he's exaggerating them.

Why didn't Sky One get this first?

Harry Potter and Joyce in the same breath. What the crap? I don't know if I'll have the sautéd monkfish with lemongrass and pepper or if I'll have the birdseye fish fingers.

It's a GHOST rifle, summoned up from the unholy grip of the stony HELLS. It fires pure EXCITEMENT. Seriously though, that game looks horrible.

He reminds me of alastair mcgowan in that smiley

... creepy and awesome at the same time

You're not giving the public enough credit. Psychonauts isn't super super-bizarre impossible-to-grasp game; you could argue that ICO suffered from leftfieldedness, but it doesn't hold for Psychonauts. There's really not much that sets it apart from other games if its type, other than an interesting base concept.

Psychonauts fits very tightly into the Platformer genre. Very tightly into the late 90's platformer genre... No, I'm not happy about the proliferation of cookie cutter driving and stealth games, but describing the gameplay of Psychonauts is special or original isn't entirely accurate. Sure, it's wonderfully realised artistically and in terms of the characterisations and dialogue, but it's a fairly middle-of-the-road platformer otherwise.

Your words, not mine. I do like Psychonauts, it's worth the asking price, but it's not one of the best games I've played. It's certainly no Beyond Good & Evil.

Well, psychonauts wasn't a game that I enjoyed terribly much. I'm probably in a minority here, but I'm sure it's not a minority of one, whether any of the rest of you care to admit it or not.

People stay away from mainstream stuff not out of outright snobbery (that the music is bad) but because they don't want to support it. One becomes very cynical about mainstream music when one sees it being marketted with millions of dollars behind it, expensive videos and marketting shenanigans. If the "underground" music is as good, or better, without all the marketting, then what's the justification for it? There's a lot of two-facedness with that sort of thing, a good example is the band Rage Against the Machine; an anarcho-syndicalist anti-capitalist band that's signed to Sony for chrissake. There's a loss of trust, and the argument about getting your music to more people doesn't hold water anymore. Considering how much music isn't in that mainstream sort of thing, it's pretty easy to completely bypass it and stick to the "underground" stuff. It's also a happy coincidence that almost all my favourite music is non-mainstream. Lucky me! This is not my point at all. What I said was that I would tell other people about the music they mightn't know about rather than the stuff they almost definitely do know. This is different to limiting yourself to that music or deriving enjoyment from that obscurity. It's the explanation I have for the obscure-bands-t-shirts thing.

Doom 3 had a better score than that in its first 3 months.

There's a lot in favour of that sort of attitude though. Sure, a lot of it is posing, but when I look at the music that I listen to every day, I notice a lot of it isn't really big stuff. A big part of this is that for a popular or well-known band, there's no need for me to tell anyone about it, the band is going to do well on its own. A lot of people who stick with the stuff you hear on MTV or whatever don't get to hear a lot of music they may well like and someone who tends to look for a lot of music that they wouldn't come across by accident like to tell their friends about it. It's not like I would go around telling everyone that (say) Bjork makes good music, because you could turn on the tv or the radio any given day and hear some. Another thing is that when bands "make it" (ie get themselves onto one of the big four labels, "sell out" as some have it), suddenly all the money you might have spent on tshirts and cds and gigs is going to Sony or Universal or whatever, who frankly have plenty of money as it is. There's something satisfying about ordering a Silver Mt Zion cd from Constellation in the mail, knowing all the money is going to the people involved, rather than to a company who's main drive for releasing music is commercially or market based.

Or maybe... ..it's just... ..not that good.........

It took me two months to hit 40 :/ The only way you're going to hit 60 in half that time is if you spend all your waking hours at it, and frankly that's not Blizzard's fault.

Differently! Well, I think I ought to stand up for WoW seeing as I'm actually paying for it. One of the best things you can do is get into a nice guild (I'm in Battle Inflictors (silly name) on Terenas) which really gives the game that sense of camaraderie and community you missed. Yesterday I hit level 40, which is when you get to buy a mount (90g!!) and as I only had 20g saved up, my guildmates all chipped in to hit the target. Guilds are the way to go, totally. Another thing is that the first real good group adventures start happening around level 18 or so (seriously, those Deadmines are a hoot). After that you're probably going to be grouping on something at least once for every 3 hours of play doing anything from raiding a castle of iron dwarves to stealing a box of snuff back off of a sea giant for Captain Hecklebury Smotts. As for maturity, this is really a server-specific thing. I've found that in general, Alliance players are younger than Horde and on average players on PvP are less mature than on PvE (PvP has a lot of the archetypical 1337 d00ds who do the ninja looting and griefing). On Terenas I have my main guy who is Alliance and another guy who's Horde and while I'm in a wonderful guild with the Alliance guy, I find the random Horde people you meet by accident to be much nicer in general and more inclined to help you out. You can really notice this in the new Battlegrounds, as Alliance will lose 3/4 games because the Horde team is more mature and better at teamwork. That's not to say that Alliance doesn't have mature people, it's just that it has the immature ones too.