Metalmickey

So, any bets on how long before we see 'Vista' being tagged on as a suffix to electronic products in an attempt to make them sound high-tech? AthlonVista CPU's anyone? etc...

I haven't read that, but if it is from 2000AD, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a Sinister and Dexter strip. They've had many singular episodes, and as gun-toting bounty hunters with a decidedly comedy side, they seem to get into bar fights and ridiculous situations rather frequently.

I really liked the film Sin City, considerably more than my standard 'guaranteed to like all comic adaptation' inclinations. I'd go as far as saying it's the best paper to screen translation of a comic's artistic style I've ever seen, with the not quite black and white filters and other effects making many of the shots look like frames right off the pages. Story and character-wise it's very bold too, possibly a little too intense or OTT for some, but I've always been a fan of wierdness and well done cliches/characatures. A few moments have a certain 'seven'-like disgust side to them which never seem to impress me, but I never felt it was gratituous, only in keeping with the general darkness of the film. It was also a nice change to see a comic adaptation to be based on a more adult series rather than just family movie type Marvel superheroes, etc. Mind you, I have only seen it once, must watch it again soon...

Hehe, as unlikely as it sounds, I think that's the first time I've been described as 'a strange man'. For some inexplicable reason I find that strangely pleasing .

Ooh, I'm a big comic fan myself, and Watchmen is probably my favourite of all. Only discovered Sin City about 2 years ago but like them too. Other favourites I've liked are the preacher series, Batman, and have had egular flings with 2000AD. I'll definately check out your link when I get home from work

but... but... I have done many times!!?!?!!!??! Sometimes, you've even told me you knew that already, like when you screamed at me in the Bob/Spaff house and I said I was Edd, and Metalmickey from thumbs. By the way, I never did find out, did you scream to see how high I would jump, or because you had no idea I would be there?

Are you serious? Will you always forget who I am? I'm sitting about 15 feet above you right now... Ah well, never mind.

I don't love him

Good thread, all of it. Made me think about things I've stopped thinking about from lack of stimulus and depressed 'why don't people see this' apathy. The humour coming from a sense of perspective thing rings very true to me. So many people's general perspective of the world is so self-centred (not selfish, just self-centred) and fed to them it's always refreshing to encounter people with a wider view of the world, but then again, they are often such depressed people that only by expressing it creatively through a medium like comedy does it become palatable and even attractive to a wider audience. I think that you have to have a certain laugh or cry attitude to deal with a lot of the things that the human race does to itself and the planet on a daily basis. I was also thinking of Bill Hicks by the end of the 2nd post, and thoroughly recommend anyone not familiar with him to go buy/rent/borrow/etc recording of some of his stand-up performances. Regarding the mainstream/indie issues, they reminded me of why I've kind of shut myself off from the media. As a young child, I grew extremely frustrated with how my young friends would always just root for the winning football team when watching a match, or rave about whoever hapenned to be at the top of the charts. It depressed me and put me off being a fan of sports in general, or pretty much liking anything that was popular. In my teens, I guess I started to notice a lot of my 'cooler' friends start to like indie stuff and generally have more obscure interests, and for a while this was good. At the same time though, many of them seemed to be doing it for the reasons you guys have already mentioned, merely to look individual, rebellious, or superior in a cliquey way, and I guess I lost some faith there too. Most people grow out of the earlier 'like whatever's popular' phase sometime in their teens, but some are still very much stuck in the second phase, which I think is what some of you have been describing. Of course there are many bands/artists/etc who are obscure and yet very deserving of praise and/or a following, but I still feel very unwelcome sometimes when I admit my ignorance of what's good in front of popculture haters. Finally, going right back to the original posts, I'd like to think that the writers/artists/musicians who best stand the test of time will always be those who do it because they have a message to express through their medium, rather than those who do what they do because it's their most fun and/or profitable career choice.

Hmm, I feel compelled to quicky post here in an effort to included amongst the intelligensia.

This is extremely depressing news I fucking love those books. My mum read them around the time I was born, and made my dad read them too. They loved them, and my mum was even afraid to tell people she didn't know very well my name for a while. I read the first 3 when I was around 10-12 I guess, and think I loved them even more than the Lord of the Rings. Read the 4th and 5th, promptly followed by the entire quintet about 6 years ago. Anyone interested should read the Left Hand of Darkness too, that's pretty famous, albeit a standalone sci-fi novel and unrelated to Earthsea. I had seen the website for this TV adaptaion and was impressed by the down to earth look of some of the sets and characters, and was really hoping it might actually be good. Truly the world is a dark and forlorn place. Forever will mankind destroy and desecrate every single beautiful thing that we have ever created, leaving naught but sorrow and despair in our black and vitriolic wake... :\

Jaws clench, fingers tense. Verbal pugilists begin to spar. On thumbs they are, ever... incensed. Will Yufster's rantings ever cease, and on the forums settle peace? My volley, my poem, pulled back, now released... And yet my hands, upon the keys continue typing unpleasantries. You are as beast, illiterate at least. Beneath me, by infinite degrees.

To put my own spin on what everyone seems to be already agreeing with (sorry), I think that back in the 'olden days', adventure games were great because they offered something unique that couldn't be found in other genres at the time. A higher level of interactivity with the environment (E.g. multiple unique objects on almost every screen), characters with life-sized dialogues, changing and fitting background music, real involvement with a story, and puzzles of many different types, all in the same game. There's probably several more things I could list if I sat here and thought about it for a few more minutes, but I hope you get my point. The fighting, racing, shooting, role-playing games of the era simply didn't offer any of those things, or perhaps just 1 at the most. However, in the last 10 years or so, all of those once-unique aspects have been taken on board in several other genres to the point which they are now expected. Half-Life 2 for example has every single one of the things in my earlier list, in addition to it's cracking FPS action. Modern role-playing games probably have even more unique interactive objects and characters than adventure games these days, Strategy games such as Warcraft 3 have great stories, cut-scenes and movies backing the different races and characters, and so on. It's not so much that other genres have come up with new ways to entertain, but that they've succesfully poached the fun out of adventures wherever possible, whereas adventures rarely manage to poach the fun out of the other genres. Thoughts? Edit: I like nudity too

Agreed. There are guys at work who pay sunscriptions to more than 1 MMORPG at the same time, but when they started playing the second one, the first one really died. I think they just don't want to stop paying because that would be turning their back on the 30+ hours a week of progress they've put in over the past several months. Since you never really finish an MMORPG, there's never really a good time to stop... except for when you pick up another one!

Now that is refreshing. Almost the only thing which I've never heard of a women being into is PC hardware. I'm not quite sure how far I'd believe you though. Hmm, if they build their own PC's... are any of them overclockers? Have any of them fiddled with memory timings in the BIOS, or unlocked the disabled pipelines in their graphics cards? I'm still thinking the answer would be no, but I'd honestly be delighted if it wasn't...

Aww, I saw this thread had been mysteriously revived (typed some wrong stuff my foot!) and thought some of us more recently joined folk could join in and try to impress. But if you say it's ancient history, I guess there's no point...

*rings the Yufster bell* Please miss, make the nasty man go away? He's scaring me :\

He certainly sounds like one And also, thank you for demonstrating that the uses of the innocent smiley are manifold, which was why I complained about it's over-use as a purely sexual one a week or so ago in some random thread (which I sincerely hope did not contribute to the recent fiasco). But I digress. Has anyone downloaded this yet? Is it fun? I played a lovely little shareware shoot 'em up on my PC recently called Starscape (no, it just sounds like several Sci-Fi series... it's not connected to any of them). It starts off like asteroids, but you travel around from zone to zone mining and shooting aliens too, but eventually research bigger ship hulls and absolutely tons of bigger weapons of different types: smart bombs, missiles, charge up guns, etc. You can even design your own ships by fitting in the engines, cargo bays, tractor beams, recharging shields, and so on. It was such refreshingly basic, blasting fun after so many years of sophisicated PC games that I just impulse bought the rest of it as played it non-stop for 2 whole days

Yeah, I was talking about just local anaesthetic for the teeth I had pulled (too much overcrowding). The worst thing after the injections was hearing the horrible wet wrenching sounds as he yanked them back and forth with his pliers to loosen them up and tear the roots, before eventually ripping them clean out of their sockets. The force he had to use to pull perfectly healthy teeth out was quite something! It's one of the few times in my life I've felt faint, or maybe that was just because of the blood loss as the new gaping holes in my gums started rapidly overflowing... Shall I stop?

I think that... Miss Scarlet unashamedly raped and killed everybody with her trusty, albeit rusty Spanner, whilst cartwheeling down the Hall, much to the delight of the janitor, who was watchingfrom the shadows, peeping Tom that he is.

Don't tell Dom what to do.

I finished Half-Life 2 at exactly midnight on New Year's Eve: my first ever anti-social New Year's Eve. You know that movie that you probably saw before the game's release, in the sewers where Alyx joins you and a combine soldier gets speared in the back by those rising blue tentacles? I can't remember that hapenning at all in the game, or ever seeing those blue tentacles. Did I play through that bit too drunk to remember? I'd hate to have forgotten entire sections like that!! Ah well, I'll play through it again in a month when I get a better graphics card. Also, how do I do one of those neat little spoiler boxes like all the clever people overuse?

I had 4 (smaller and easier) teeth removed ages ago over a couple of weeks. For the last one, I had to have 3 bloody injections due to my increasing tolerance to the anaesthetic. God, having someone repeatedly stick needles into my gums is horrible! I shudder remembering it I don't think I looked like a chipmunk after, though I'm sure wisdom teeth removal creates a lot more trauma in your mouth than the teeth nearer the front.

Yeah the quality of The Bard's Tale's narration is definately one of key parts of the humour. Have you tried just higlighting each stat and leaving the description to hear it fully? He says something different, but always funny, depending on how high the stat is. Also, put the controller down in-game and wait for 20 seconds or so, and lots of other little snippets of random humour

Professor Plum brutally and sadistically morrdorr murdered them with a Revolver in the cosy confines of his dining room whist they tucked into their Christmass dinner.