Nachimir

2 hour break, then 30 minutes further in: This is a fucking turd of a game.

I've played four hours of this today, and the more I play it the less I like it I've gone from feeling ambivalent about it to actually hating it. Story missions today. Last mission: get inside the fortress and kill someone or tag some gold in the desert. 45 diamonds for a "stealth suit" sounded like it was going to be an awesome upgrade. I'd already done some sneaking into towns to kill people, and wanted to be able to do it better. So anyway, even in the middle of the night it doesn't stop snipers that aren't being rendered yet (blood on screen gives direction, yet no tower, no silhouette and no muzzle flash) from picking you off while you're sneaking through bushes, crouched. I reloaded the game, didn't waste any money on the suit then tried again with exactly the same results, and took them out by running out of cover towards them until I could actually see them and take them down with the dart rifle. Inside the fortress, even without the stealth suit, the AI at times couldn't see me even though I was in the middle of a courtyard right in front of them. After completing the mission, I'm driving along a road when I get rammed, shot dead, rescued, kill the bad guys, then more pile over a hill, kill my buddy and kill me. It's not like there wasn't a recent save, but that's exactly when I thought "I can't be fucking arsed with this". The map is insanely over populated, and moving around it is as hard if not harder than the missions I've done so far. Upgrades and new weapons are often frustratingly rubbish (despite having earned enough to buy some fairly good kit. Another crappy upgrade was the "assault ammo upgrade", which doesn't actually give you more assault rifle ammo). Lining up a good headshot doesn't guarantee a kill, sometimes an enemy can soak up a stupid amount of bullets without dying. The AI is poor. I look back on about 12 - 16 hours of playing and can remember perhaps two moments when I was actually enjoying it, now I just look at how much map is between me and whatever objective then sigh

Pretty much in agreement with Rodi on Quantum of Solace. I'm not a huge fan of Bond because it tends to be so shallow, but this and Casino Royale are both action flicks that are a little bit more experimental and give the characters a tad more depth. The latter half of the plot did veer back to typical James Bond thematic melodrama/campness, which is smacks of jonesing for the visual potential of the cold war. The opera scene was good, and I liked that In turn, I thought the film acknowledged Bond's shallowness while keeping him entertaining. I'm still kind of mystified as to why Fields was dressed up as a strippergram though.

Me too. They're doing a good thing. In theory. Making a plan like that work wouldn't exactly be easy for anyone though: finding someone to look after your kid while appearing on national TV, having the acting chops to pull that off, having the strength to withstand constant press attention under pressure, making sure noone spots your kid, coming up with plausible and investigatable story for disappearance and safe return, then keeping your kid quiet about it in perpetuity afterward. All of that while constantly having the police and the press poking around. It's not like noone has done anything like that before, but there aren't many people who could pull it off and I doubt anyone will try for the sake of $25K (Attention is a more likely motive). It may annoy fans when games companies do things like offer rewards when people have already started slinging mud, and we may just see games companies bending over to anti-games journalism, but that isn't what happened here. The press (at least, that linked in this thread) reported it in a very reasonable way from the start, and by doing what they did, MS put themselves above reproach while the sad facts of this story played out. Likewise for Sony with the LBP recall; many fans saw it as unnecessary, but it took any wind right out of the sails of critics and they ended up with Muslim groups on their side instead of speaking out against them. The parents weren't going to be thinking very rationally since their son had gone missing. Meeting a predator online was probably one of the more subtle fears they had during all of this, and unfortunately one of their worst was realised. There's no anti-games agenda there, just a very sad story about a kid dying.

Badass :tup: No

Yeah, I tend to pick them up if I'm passing in a jeep and notice the GPS flashing, but not really worth hunting a whole map segment for so few. Assassinations pay 14, which is getting me some decent kit

PS3, so no quick save alas. I don't mean to sound too negative, and I am enjoying it. When I say chore, I mean awesome beautiful chore, but still repetitive. Just did one and a half assassination missions in an hour, carefully picking my routes to avoid the checkpoints and occasionally massacring a patrol or two. Relying on my hearing more makes it easier too; hearing a patrol jeep coming and hunkering down until it's passed is pretty cool. I'm sure a lot of my feelings toward it are also because I've been focusing less on the story and more on earning lots of diamonds to unlock decent weapons.

Not an hour to get to a save point, but to get from one, to the nearest radio antenna, to the target, and back to a save point nearby. One I did on Saturday seriously took an hour of thrashing across the terrain in cars, boats and on foot, getting ambushed, restocking on ammo, health etc., doing the mission, then getting back out to the nearest save point. Most probably take me more like 20 - 30 minutes to run that cycle, but it still feels like a chore when the missions themselves are so brief, and generally very easy. It kind of surprises me since most distances are a lot shorter than they look on the map, but it has a habit of throwing up obstacles like "go around this meandering ridge, or through the militia checkpoint", and both can add a lot of time to a journey. It's very pretty and I enjoy playing it to an extent, but it feels a bit bland and repetitive in the same way Assassin's Creed did. FC2 obstructs me far more than it challenges me.

I agree, it's absolutely beautiful, and the systemic aspects remind me of Stalker. The lighting can get very flat at night or in bad weather, but when it's sunny everything really pops. More games should have Baobab trees

I absolutely love Pushing Daisies It is both slickly produced and offbeat, with just the right amount of silliness too. The Fall was also spectacular, giving me a lot of "whoah" moments where there was something particularly stunning and I remembered it has no CGI.

I see now, thanks for clarifying. It'd be interesting to have a breakdown of where those immigrant voters are originally from. It does look like a lack of solidarity (among the Left? Never! ), but it's entirely possible that they come from more conservative cultures.

When it was announced a while ago, he seemed bemused by the nomination rather than hungry for more attention. I thought that was pretty classy If he milked it though, he could perhaps become the British Hoff.

I'm not sure I understand your point. It's racist for non-white people to vote for a non-white candidate? Or it's racist for white voters not to? No doubt there were voters on both sides, among them all, who made their decision superficially on feelings around race, but you can't infer that reason for all of any given bloc. It's a cultural change that's required to eradicate it, and those only happen glacially. There was never going to be a first black president without a huge dollop of racism on the sidelines, but his election in itself provides a massive push to effect a change in general attitudes. Also, I swear I could hear the sound of hundreds of millions of uptight white consciences unclenching all over the world on Tuesday... Prop 8 sucks Chris Remo's balls. Coupled with this election, shooting it down might have transformed America's image abroad to that of an amazingly progressive beacon. My American friends on facebook are spitting mad about it, I would be too if I lived in there. I'd expect it to pass somewhere like Kansas or Texas, but California? Come on. I'm sure conservative strategists were quietly stirring up the prop 8 pot in California while watching the McCain campaign shamble from one humiliation to the next. Fortunately there are legal challenges brewing against it.

Not fine art, but damn fine illustation and appropriate given the Left 4 Dead demo is out today for preorders: By Jason Chan. Click for wallpaper size.

lol You got the URL right Mr. Remo, I registered strategychocolate.biz and currently have web forwarding pointing to thumbs. I might use it in future to host a blog about the worst bits of tacky game marketing, but that idea is on the back-back burner so it'll probably just point to thumbs for the next two years If I do turn it into a site, then depending on your permission I'd like to clip the intro to episode 2 and embed it on an about page, with credit of course.

Small spike relative to 360 and Wii sales. I doubt any amount of content will make up for the price cuts Sony are unable to make right now.

via Duncan on Twitter:

AMERICA, FUCK YEAH! (I'm relieved, and quietly pleased )

Jesus My favorite so far has been the full page free paper ad, on the front page of several in London last week. The picture is a full page of a Bond girl in a slinky minidress, with an inset of Daniel Craig beside and "ENTER THE WORLD OF BOND" written underneath with a badly photoshopped in barrel of Heinekin. That's what all women look like when you've drunk that much of it I suppose I really wouldn't be happy if I was Daniel Craig and thinking about my career right now. If I didn't want to keep my ebay account, I'd put a listing up for his arse.

Thanks but it's not that, our key is just alphanumeric with nothing special in there. I've tried inputting all the IP/DNS settings manually too, no dice. Going to try a firmware upgrade on the router later. Failing that, I may disable security just to log in and buy Wipeout HD, then hope it works when the PS3 is offline. I've also been thinking of buying an OpenWRT compatible router, but it's not exactly high on the wishlist.

Jesus wept that's incredible

Daniel Craig is going to be remembered as the most commercial of all the James Bonds. Things like him in a suit waving a silenced sub-machine gun around, with "BARCLAYCARD" written underneath, have really undercut any enthusiasm I had to see this

I've only had this once, when I binged on RTS games. I do also sometimes go through phases with genres, like playing Monkey Island on my DS sent me into a phase of point and click adventures, F.E.A.R. started a phase of FPS games that ended with S.T.A.L.K.E.R., etc.

The high action/low action is a realy nice way of making parkour controllable. I enjoyed this on a single run through of the demo at the expo, but died a lot. Especially on a section where you have to jump and grab a pipe. Every time I walked by the line of Mirror's Edge demo machines, there were a couple of people dying from long falls ¬¬

Jazz: Skalpel. I normally hate jazz, but they really got under my skin this year. Apparently (I'm told) Polish jazz is full of strange offshoots, since under communism a lot of Western music was forbidden but jazz was ok. It led to a lot of experimentation. Claro Intelecto also do some downbeat stuff like this, this, and this which I love but can only find a 30 second sample of online. Not so downtempo, but I've been listening a lot for the past few months: The Field <-- full tracks at last FM, also like (Thanks Wrestlevania ).Max De Wardener is ok though bleak. I've also been getting addicted to some raucous tracks recently. Teenage Badgirl by Cocotte has some absolutely excellent glitch+70s synths in there after the 2 minute mark, and Ccut Up by Duchess Says is probably the best song for running to ever made.