Nachimir

"Flower has this thing I also liked about..." haha Had you guys all had a lot of coffee before this? You interrupted and talked over each other quite a lot this time.

OMG

Most of Kid 606 made me go "Ouch my fucking ears" but there's some really good stuff in there I think. Never got much into Cex, but I did really like this one. (edit) While we're on pop, I've tried very, very hard to hate by Alphabeat, and I can't. It's just too infectiously happy. Likewise for Hey Ya, when I worked in a club we all tried to hate it and caved after a month or so.Here's that Kid606 remix of Kylie. Maybe I prefer remixes of pop mainly because they let me listen to something with an obvious hook while keeping an air of music snobbery and moody bleeping ¬¬

I still haven't done any of the main story, though I'm about to look in a vault that my father is supposed to have gone to. I was actually quite impressed that I could go to Rivet City and skip the first mission of the main story. One thing I'm finding is that the more of the map I explore, the less of a pleasure it becomes. There was something nice about the mystery and intimidation of it at the beginning, but now, knowing I can handle pretty much anything the wasteland throws at me, it's getting duller and I want to race through it.

Oh look, horrible flyouts and a right hand sidebar full of confusing, over-designed typography. I count at least 6 different navs on that front page. In recent years, Nottingham City Council have found it much cheaper to advertise with slogans like "Proud of Nottingham" rather than do things to, you know, make people proud of Nottingham. I expect this will get worse since it was recently revealed that the city council had £40M invested with Landisbank.

Yeah, I just have a personal dislike of the 80s for some reason. FWIW, the 90's were far worse. Edit: Actually, I remember being in Tunisia when they played that really loud over and over again on one section of the beach, and that was 1989 ¬¬ It was a portent of things to come though, I remember a lot of 90's pop being that annoying.

Agreed; "Holy shit that's John Hodgman" definitely took away from the drama around Anders head injury for me.

This surprised me at first, but not on reflection. is very poppy compared to earlier stuff that reminded me of, say, Add N To X. (Fact: I once put this on and just a few bars in Yufster said "What the fuck is this?" and changed it).I'm not entirely hostile to pop music as I once was, but prefer remixes to plain chart versions. Kid 606 did an excellent remix of "Can't get you out of my head" by Kylie, called "Smack My Glitch Up". Alas, not online in full anywhere as far as I can tell. Pop has generally been getting quite strange in the face of declining CD sales, which I think is a good thing. It's not that anything around now is particularly artistic or credible compared to more specific genre work, but it seems better now than the absolute shit I remember from the 80's and 90's.

Yeah, though I'm glad the door straight ahead from the bridge goes directly from the market. I did a couple of side quests there, got annoyed at finding people, and now only go there to trade. I'm at level 15 and only finding fights with the really heavy sentry bots difficult now. Upgrading the big guns skill will probably make them easier, but some well exploited terrain and a few rockets seem to put paid to even the beefiest enemies. I want to upgrade my sniper rifle skill and wipe out the Talon Company encampment near soon, but given that the random encounters with them tend to be the hardest fights I get into, I'm not sure it's particularly doable. Maybe if I nibble the sentries off one at a time... Deathclaws are also annoying at the moment. I took the perk that stops Yao Guai (terrible, terrible pun to name them with with ¬¬) and lesser animals from attacking, and that saves me quite a bit of ammo, but sometimes if I send dogmeat back to 101 and there's one nearby it will kill him. His pathfinding and gung-ho attitude mean he sometimes runs off around some scenery only to turn up in my sniper rifle sights in the middle of a stupid number of enemies. Any fighting without VATs also = a pretty high risk of him getting caught by my fire too. The fights are getting to the point where he isn't tough enough to accompany me everywhere, which means I'm finding him a lot more annoying than the dog in Fable 2 and tend to just leave him at Vault 101 all the time. He's frustratingly fearless for a character that can die.

Sorry, my friends haven't graphed it. They said about a day if they use the wifi and GPS sparingly.

My thoughts exactly. n0wak, your idea about Kara seems very plausible. Also, some very, very strange relationship stuff is about to happen around Saul Tigh. Well, already is.

X certainly is, but I only noticed because of wipeout HD.

I've not modified any consoles, but I do make and repair things with solder occasionally. Practice soldering a lot before going near your Dreamcast, it's very, very easy to make a bad job of it: Scratching a track off the board, dumping too much solder, etc., are all easy things to do but not necessarily easy to fix. Also, make sure you have a fine enough tip for your iron. Stock ones are sometimes a bit chunky for working on some PCBs. If you're looking to solder a lot, Portasol do really good gas powered irons that use lighter fuel, are obviously cordless, and warm up a lot faster than an electric iron.

The gender-bent magnifying glass is a masterful touch

Three friends with these say the battery life is rubbish (they love them all the same though). Their verdict: You're lucky to get a full day's usage out of it, and using the GPS cuts it down ridiculously. It's possible but not certain that software patches may improve this somewhat.

In response to the question earlier, yes, The Movies is regarded as a failure. I'm not sure what the sales were, but I'm pretty sure they were much lower than Lionhead expected. It doesn't really matter, but Scrobbs is a better name IMO.

I made it to 7.34 before the opera singer and high pitched synth viscerally forced me away. Also, this thread as well as fullbright on Twitter prompted me to start this one. I reckon I've heard worse than the song at that Wired article. We did this once at Nalicity, it was both horrible and excellent.

Agh, a fucking Wednesday. I really want to go to every hide and seek, but London and back mid-week is never very practical. I've been to a few before and recommend it; they have some brilliantly fun things there. At the LGF one there was even a laser assault course in a darkened room

I saw this term used once in explaining how to crop photographs well, it it made sense at the time, but I suspect that was only because they were showing with photos and cropping frames at the same time. I can see how it would easily become a horrible, lazy term for people who can't describe what they want out of a brief though.

Heh

*shake* *shake* *shake* That was part of the spat on Twitter that made me start this thread. He advocates "Video game" as *the* correct term, whereas some very good and well respected industry sites consistently use "video game". It's not as if that book came from any kind of industry consensus, and for all I know they might have some good reasoning behind their choices. The approach though, on behalf of any term, that everyone should use language in the same way and have identical standards is purebred fucking nonsense, and difference in usage from one outlet to another is a non-issue to boot. English is not an IEEE standard. It does not have a specification. Culture and language just don't work that way. Dictionaries get revised to include new words and sometimes new spellings. Americanisations and present English spellings intermingle in the wild and breed rampantly despite nitpicky efforts to keep them apart and ensure the eventual victory of a pure, separatist master race of words. Very, very old spellings have all but died out, though the expletives we use and they way some words express refined culture still have roots in the Norman conquest of Britain over 900 years ago, and the resulting relegation of Anglo-Saxon terms to the serfs (for instance "Shit" is derived from Saxon speech, "Excrement" from French). People use, reuse, abuse and adapt their native tongues, losing the roots of all these mods through generations. No matter how many people want to make demands or issue decrees around it, they're pissing in the wind and I'll gladly piss on them. Once again, the excellent Stephen Fry on this issue.

They should use a load of these and follow them up with a cliche like "This game will knock your socks off!" IGN.com

No, this. It's 7, 70 or so minute episodes written by the same guys who did The Wire. It's starts with US marines preparing to invade Iraq in Kuwait, and follows them all the way to Baghdad. I binge watched most of it at the weekend, and finished it off last night. It's excellent, has a lot of black humour, brutal, disturbing, and I liked the ending.

I got that last week, still waiting to get a chance to sit down with it properly (and not get distracted by Fallout 3). The eurogamer review made it sound excellent and interesting despite the lack of raving about it.

If you're doing bits of the UK too, we have two living rooms full of sofas and stuff. However, Nottingham kind of sucks. It's full of squealing hen parties at night and Nottingham castle isn't even a castle because some dudes burned it down hundreds of years ago, then some other dudes replaced it with a country house