Nachimir

Yes, definitely tedium rather than difficulty. I like the drama of the ending, but as a mission it feels like an anti-climax compared to chasing a fire engine or firing missiles at a helicopter from a dam. I know what you mean about the world becoming empty, I felt that way after finishing all of the others though. I made sure to do the pigeons, jumps etc. before going for the last mission, because otherwise I probably wouldn't. I wanted to learn the city well for playing online, and now know it pretty well.

It turns out you just have to have one good bitch about it on a forum before you can then do it in one go.

THIS POST CONSISTS ALMOST ENTIRELY OF SPOILERS I'm finally trying the last mission (Dmitri version), and it's a fucking ball ache. The driving part is so easy it's incredibly boring. Likewise the shooting at the casino. Hopping onto little Jacob's helo I'm finding about 50/50, sometimes it seems I just can't catch up with him in time, but the first time I found it easy. Helicopter chase, I've only been in once and got shot down by a rocket as I was turning round a building. Getting in the boat is frigging annoying, and the last time I did it just now, it got FUCKING BLOWN UP WITH A ROCKET just as I was getting in. I don't mind missions being hard, or having to try them again and again, but wasting ten minutes of my life on the boring car chase and shooting part every time I fail is going to drive me insane It's just appallingly bad and joyless compared to the rest of the game

I've not found a snappy quote for this one, but it's just been announced that J. Allard's new title at Microsoft is the awesome and extreme sounding "CXO", which stands for Chief eXperience Officer.

XKCD sometimes does a similar thing, and I've seen other webcomics do it too. I often wonder if such comics are referencing things happening in the author's life.

PR people are blatantly instructed to lie in the run up to big announcements, but yeah. A 2 post wonder on some random forum is most probably faking it.

At the Black Cat Forums, some guys like this signed up, and the first thing they did was send this kind of shit to me. Not the best strategy, since I'm one of the mods

Happy Day-After-Your-Birthday Toblix

Damn. I've been saving up loads of creatures in a folder. Wonder if dropping them into a HTML gallery will work...

n0wak, if PC and console were open platforms, the difference would be that consoles are much more the kind of thing people would put under their TV, whereas the PC has stabilised on either being a laptop or a big ugly box. Intermediates, like Shuttle PCs, just aren't so common because they tend to involve the added expense of less standard components. Yes, MS has made a mess with Games for Windows and Xbox live (taking down the least popular games? Exactly the opposite of what you should do with digital distribution, it needs better filters, not less content). All of these things are screwing up because the people in charge have never done it before and are essentially winging it; pretty much anyone would be at the point in the development of the net. Whoever does it will fuck it up in some respect, people will copy, and iterations will get better. Convergence is really difficult. It's often been called a complete dud because certain efforts at it were so awful and didn't take off, but it is happening. Mobile phones are kind of an obvious target for it, they're a pocket device with a clear function that just happens to also be a device munching widget on it's way to becoming an omni-computer (Camera, videocamera, dictaphone, wifi, GPS... etc. etc.). In the living room it gets a lot more difficult. Obviously, some kind of network connected computer is going to handle it. Whether it's the TV, a set-top box, DVD player, amplifier, another new box (apple tv), or a games console, something is going to convincingly and efficiently take on lots of functions at some point. It's not even slightly clear which device will do it and how. The one that succeeds will automatically make sense to people, and nothing quite does yet. I think a games console will be a strong contender for it. twmac, I think you're correct about the hardware issues, but if the licensing company handled it correctly, reputation hits would point back to specific manufacturers rather than the brand. Like I already said though, I don't expect MS will open up the 360 hardware. It seems too far fetched a rumour.

Most of them have things like weapon upgrades in them. I think they scale with your characters - so as your skills and inventory get to higher levels, the upgrades you find anywhere also get beefier. Capsules you couldn't open before should have much better kit in them later than if you opened them earlier. Weapon and armor upgrades are worth having, but I did all the crash sites I could find and ended up with far too much stuff though. Much of it I just sold, not because I needed the money, but because I needed the inventory menus to be less cluttered. There are some very expensive weapons to buy at various points in the game (At some point an exclusive "Shadows" weapon shop opens), but if you wait a quest or two you can almost always find better kit to pick up off the floor.

It's not so much a benefit to consumers as incentive/sneaky deposition of their hardware in people's homes. Multiple SKUs have been targeting everyone from "hardcore" gamers to families so far, but it's possible they could do much better than that by licensing the hardware to other firms with better understandings of different markets and technologies. Even if the Wii-type controller rumours prove to be true, MS aren't going to compete with the Wii on it's own territory with that kind of "me too" approach. Likewise with a Blu-Ray player. Turning the 360 into a platform like the PC might propel it even further though. Any company that wanted to make a 360 flavoured device would have to pay Microsoft a lot of money for the privilege - MS own the chipset this time round. Consider it the reverse of Sony's approach with the PS3 - they sold it as a high end gaming console with all this other stuff built into it. That's a specific proposition that appeals to a specific kind of person - a gamer. TV shops aren't selling it as a Blu-Ray player that happens to play PS3 games. Licensing console technology to third parties would sneak it into all kinds of other sales propositions: "Sure, we make set top boxes, but this one is 360 capable". It turns the 360 into more of a brand than a device, and could make the brand a lot more malleable. If they're raking in licensing fees or even royalties, MS don't have to worry so much about attach rates either - the respective manfacturers would all be incentivised to help sell games. Sony and Nintendo have both fought to get new demographics, and largely succeeded, over the past 14 years. Since the first Xbox, Microsoft have struggled, targeted traditional gamers, and largely been behind on demographics. Their consoles have a particular image that isn't the most profitable one, and licensing hardware could give them a sneaky route to getting 360s and resultant game sales into new groups of people. I doubt it's about to happen with the 360 because it just seems far too radical a move for MS, but at some point I think such a platform will be a logical step.

I spent about 40 hours doing as many side missions as I could find, and there were still skills I hadn't got all the way up. I had a pretty badass set by the end of the game though.

Sporepedia hit the 1 million mark yesterday evening. Astounding. This one is called LoafOfBread: and they're by different people but show up on the same results page

Yeah, the non-story planets, you get dropped in the Mako and wander around a square heightmap looking for stuff to collect and blow away. There are crashed space probes, ships and artefacts around, which tend not to let you in until you have pretty high hacking skills. This is really annoying early in the game, I spent a while just leveling Shepherd up in that respect. There are also installations around, usually full of one flavour of bad guy or other and often surrounded by gun turrets that require cannon shells from the Mako. Just take some time to scan all the planets in a solar system, there's usually one that gives the option to land.

You can scan the planets from the solar system view, and the map will show anomalies. Some anomalies can be recognised by their shapes, and as long as you're cruising around carefully in the Mako you can generally avoid getting fired on. You can even pop over hills and snipe stuff with the big cannon. There are a whole load of ambushes on some planets and there's no real way to tell, but if you get fired on you can generally run away faster than whatever's firing on you and they won't chase beyond a certain range. A lot of the non-story and non-subplot missions have random mercs to waste, using a scope you can often see them standing around an installation from miles away. Look out for large flat areas in the middle of hills and avoid them. Some of them conceal nasty giant burrowing worms that hurl acid, and can nuke the Mako in one shot. Sometimes the glitch and keep firing acid to one side of you, in which case you can sit perfectly still and pound the shit out of them, but if they don't you have to keep moving, hope one doesn't come up right underneath you, and get cannon shots off at it whenever you can. The random planet missions are pretty disappointing after a while, as they're just heightmaps with a few randomly distributed events that quickly get quite repetitive.

I eyed it up on blu ray until last Friday. Holy freaking shit, I've only watched the episode on mountains so far and this was totally worth £40.

Yeah, missions and planets unlock as you go along. There are plenty of little things you can do on the non-story planets to level up, but they get very samey.

Will Wright (snort): Segway:

I'm kinda worried, since mine was a RROD replacement and has always sounded like a hoover. No probs so far in a few hundred hours of playing... Are the new ones quieter than your average desktop PC?

Combat largely swings on the abilities. I couldn't be bothered with them at first, but kept dying a lot until I'd learned to use them. The interface of the game has a lot of flaws, but once you find a few abilities that are useful to you it's easy enough to snap them out quickly. Make sure to use the cover system a lot too; you really can't Rambo a lot of this game.

I won't be happy until I can get NAZI WOW GOLD (perhaps we can beat all the gold farming sites to the top of google's results).

They all have corresponding weapon skills IIRC. I think they start with certain biases too: Kaiden is not a gunfighter - take him for his late stage biotic abilities. They can really fuck your enemies up in fights, i.e. they're floating around on the ceiling while you fill them up with nutritious bullets. Wrex = shotgun + biotics and tough as fuck. Ashley = assault rifles, can lay down accurate firepower at a decent range. Liara = biotic. A very good one. I ended up using Ashley and Liara because their abilities are so undiluted. All rounders like that Turian fellow just kept getting killed for me. As well as that, you need to add augmentations to the weapons, which make them much deadlier. My main character just used a pistol (+ sniper) for the whole game, but with the right mods it did a fuckload of damage. Are you doing any side missions? Boosting my stats with them made the rest of the game considerably easier, and the difficulty doesn't scale like Oblivion or something. There were even side missions that opened before my team was good enough to do them. Also: cultivate the special powers and use them in fights. Playing this game like an FPS will just lead to buckets of FAIL.

I'm crying and I can't stop

I eagerly await a Daily Mail article on spornographic steganography corrupting our children by the back door.