DanJW

Heh, that was good. I was thinking of this. Blue sky in games FTW

The "audition" one? I loved that

I've been watching Torchwood the past few weeks, the Doctor Who Spin off (spot the anagram!) It's... OK, I guess. The first episode grabbed my interest at least, and the fourth one had a nice twist on the cybermen, but failed to deliver at the end. It's all a bit hokey to be honest, and the BBC special effects don't really help. Also the "monster of the week" format is so 90's. The show is basically X-files meets The Bill. I'm sorry to say, that after some of the excellent sci-fi I've seen from the US over the past couple of years or so (BSG and Firefly at the top) I've lost faith that British TV can do sci-fi well. It's not just the FX budgets, it's the writing and the understanding of the genre (although the show does have some good gags in the black humour vein). US screen scifi right now seems to be catching up fast to the written format, which itself is much more accepted as "serious" over there. Over here the whole thing still seems to be treated in a kind of amateur kid-in-his-bedroom kind of way. Bah.

Hah, that's exactly what Golden Joysticks are like

Yeah, but to be honest, aren't these the video game awards for people that don't play games?

Ahh, my little rubber keyed ZX. Can't remember them all, buit those I do include Pteradon Attack (space invaders clone), Way of The Tiger which worked about twice but was great, and the LoTR text adventure, where we never got further than bree. Best death in that game: eat apple you cannot eat that eat table you canot do that eat Sam Sam fights you off and stabs you with his dagger you are dead. retry y/n But the best one was Saboteur. Good ninjaring fun.

So, the consus seems to be that the secret is: Subject Matter and Theme. Which should be easy to change in theory, but it is probably very difficult to get a game made that deals with uncommon subject matter. Because of the "risk". The risk adverse suits really do my head in. On one hand they want the money from the female market, on the other they're too scared to take it. They're like that kid at the water park who holds up the queue of the highest flume because they have suddenly chickened out and wet themselves when it's their turn, and just stand there sobbing. Also, this should be obvious and has been kind of said already, but I'd like to point out that there will never be a game that appeals to the whole of the female market. The female market is just as divided, if not more so, as the male one. So any game makers hoping to make a female friendly game will have to be much MUCH more specific on which female sector they are aiming for.

Hang on, you have the spare PS2 that I gave you back, you know, the "broken" one that I got working again? Why are you still trying to whore another PS2 off people? Also, if you succeed, can I have the silver one back? Thanks.

Have you played it? The Theme Movie Studio part is actually very well polished and in my mind falls into that catagory of games that take genre staples but hones them and improves them until almost perfect. Where i think The Movies failed is in the machinema engine part. In making it accessible they made it too restrictive; camera angles are chosen by tick box, and cannot be moved freely. This and other similar annoyances makes everyone's movie look the same and cripples their creative visions. A shame, since I had high hopes for the game breaking machinema into a much wider audience.

Hey, maybe we should have a thread on who has the best way to court Yufster. Oh, wait...

Heh, clever. Ialso have not worn a watch in some time. When I was younger I used to collect broken watches. Not on purpose though.

Weird, everyone has assumed the Iraq allegory, but when Spaff and I watched the first couple of episodes the first thing we thought of was the Nazi holocaust. After all, what you have here is not aforce trying to "liberate" the civilians; we have one race which considers itself superior to the other and has complete dominance over it. In this context the "let them out to stretch their legs" moment was especially chilling. As for the word insurgency.. do the colonials ever call themselves that? i think they call themselves The Resistance. The Cyclons call it the Insurgencey, because words like that are useful for public relations (which is what D'Annas model is for). Finally, Exodus 1 was less eventful than I hoped for, but boy did it leave me wanting to see the next episode!

We don't use that name here any more

In this case there is historical precedent. One of the stories about Thermopylae is that someone told one of the Spartans that the Persians had so many archers that their arrows blocked out the sun. The Spartan's reply was, allegedly "excellent, that means we can fight in the shade". Another famous quote was born from this battle (or the accounts of it at least). Persians: Hand over you weapons Spartan: Come get them. Yes, I've been reading up a lot about the battle of Thermopylae. Great stuff; there are indeed some good wikipedia entries about it. My father told me his own Thermopylae story when I told him about this movie (he just got back from Greece). In his youth he used to drive bus-fulls of hippies around various far off places. The legendary "Freak Wagons". On one trip with a bus off American trippers he arrived at Thermopylae. The Statue depicts a naked Spartan with a tall spear. He told his passengers that the name on the statue was "Thermo-pile", and it depicted an ancient Greek doctor who had been the first to invent a treatment for haemoroids using a 'thermal lance' - the one in the doctor's hands. The passengers were very interestred in this story and took several photos of the statue to show everyone back home. I have a suspicion that my father had lots of little tricks like this. I'm not going to tell you what he did to the bus-load of Australians in Amsterdam.

Strangley topical.

I bet they originally planned to rip WoW apart and take the piss a lot more. Blizzard probably said no and made them change or take a lot of it out. EDIT: FFS DAN LOG OUT!

Ooooh, oooh! <waves hands frantically>. The handheld-camera effect in the Shadow of the Colossus cut-scenes made them seem incredibly real to me, in exactly the naturalistic way you describe. Perhaps this is a good stage to point out that there is more to realism than lots of polygons and high resolution textures. As well as the trick above and things like colour pallettes, for me, good animation pays off incredibly (it's the reason I think people are so happy with the graphics in the GTA series - low polygon, but excellently animated).

Heh, at my art course the other day we were discussing photorealism. It's pretty easy to draw or paint a photorealistic piece, working from a souce photograph and using the right techniques (this is different to using a photo as inspiration or a basic guide and then doing your own thing from it). However, it does take a very very long time, is very boring and is ultimately pointless, bacause it is much easier to just make another print of the photo and copying by hand has a) only minor artistic merit does even less to improve your skills in the long run. I hadn't thought about comparing it to game graphics until now.

Baseball? Oh, right. I assumed that it was cricket and didn't make sense. How's that for cultural disparity?

No. Please no. I dont want games bigger than Oblivion. I want well crafted gameplay that is small and compact and FUN. Also, textures are generally tiled. The randomiser thing you describe would not help. The next exciting thing in textures and so fourth will be procedural content, as in Spore, but for that you don't need ROM disc space, just fast processing speeds and lots of RAM, ie stuff in the machine.

Tried again and got some more familiar to me. 22 points. You're batting 440

You've scored 10 points. You're batting 400. Bah. I'm much better with dev studios.

Ah, right, I get you now. They're pretending it's for the games. Aslo, a hard drive based console would still differ from PC in several ways. The main one being that all the hardware and programming platform would be standard, so there is no worry about scaling your game to varying system specs.

Star Eye is right, Phil Harrison is engaging in some very clever politician style side stepping. Either that or he has misunderstood what everyone else is saying. He is correct in saying that once you have the BR drive installed, adding movie playback on top of ROM doesn't cost much. Of course that's not what the general commmunity is saying; WE'RE saying that it was the BR ROM that pushed the costs up, which is true. OK, he's a metaphor. Imagine a restaurant. waiter: I'm sorry sir, your meal will take a while longer to prepare, and will be very expensive, because of the blue cheese sauce. hungry man: Wow. Does it have to have the blue cheese sauce? Because I might not be able to afford that. waiter: You must have the clue cheese sauce. HM: Your blue cheese sauce is about to screw you over, because I'm out of here. waiter: Sir, adding chives to the blue cheese source hardly increases the cost at all. Once we had the the blue cheese sauce in place, adding chives was extremely cost effective. HM: ...

Yeah, it's all PAL and all good. I don't know Final Fantasy much, but I recognise some of the Square Enix names in KH2, and there's a handy journal that has character profiles with a bit of backstory on each.