Nachimir

There are lots of different ones; the variation in accents throughout the UK is somewhat comparable to the variation of accents in the US (Which could seem a bit strange, given that the UK is about the size of Michigan). Noone knows why. Ginger is being overly harsh, only a few sound like someone trying to talk and shit out of the same hole. In classist terms, Northern accents are typically seen as working class, but to be fair, really plummy upper class accents can also make me want to take a cricket bat to people.

I just went to see The Apples. Tonights gig was 1 drummer, 1 double bassist, 2 on saxes, 1 trombone, 1 trumpet and 2 DJs scratching. Apparently, they sometimes swell to 12 people or so. They did a Ska version of Killing In The Name Of, the crowd went nuts. The track called "Attention" is more typical of them. Great stuff to dance to

I'm seeing the same as Toblix :-(

Pretty average to be turned on or off by certain accents. I find women with Newcastle accents hot, but make it Liverpool or Birmingham and I'm trying not to laugh. A thick Nottingham accent means my skin drags me behind as it crawls away.

My work email got switched to gmail recently. This morning I find my IMAP client can't login, the mail section of the web pages just says "information unavailable" and finally, after hunting and pecking in domain admin and finding a direct link to my inbox, I'm told: This is pretty much the most non-user friendly thing that has ever happened to me in 12 years of using email. Tech support send out canned responses that don't answer my questions. Some of the top results in google for other people who've encountered this show their email has been offline for 14 days or so. FUCKING CUNTS.

"Anne Diamond stabbed to death with pitchfork amidst fountains of her own blood" "This kind of violence can only be bad for you" It almost beats Al Menconi.

That all sucks, and I'm sorry to hear it :-( I got a stomach bug last week, and woke up in the middle of the first night vomiting. It massacred my digestive tract and until Sunday I couldn't eat anything without feeling sick and swelling up due to massive amounts of stubborn gas squatting in my belly. All better now though.

I don't know why, but even coming across it while ill and channel surfing at the weekend, I couldn't muster enough interest to watch (Which is odd. I didn't think Hogfather was great, but passable). I'm kind of glad you confirmed it's awful Marek, else I'd think I was just having an allergic reaction to marketing or something. Edit: I think it's the casting. Looking at a picture of David Jason and Sean Astin in it really grates against all the impressions the books gave me so long ago. Just trawled google for some reviews/reactions and found possibly the most oblique insult ever at rllmuk: "One thing I've learned from watching this is that Ubisoft are churning out an awful lot of identikit shovelware for DS." Kind of like seeing an artist complemented on his picture frames

They've not been seen as a kid thing since Sony and the Nineties. Similarly, I hear developers regularly talking about the British public being anti-games. Either they're getting a biased sample, or I am. I hardly ever meet people who don't like games or think badly of them. Pretty much all of these viewpoints are true... somewhere. At some point in the past they were even dominant, but stuff changes while perceptions stay where they were. Yes, games companies need business skills. Understanding games is not enough. A whole load of UK developers went under in recent years due to a lack of business and management skills. Like advertising in the 80s, games in the 90s were going through a period with massive expansion, everyone was excited, and as a result there wasn't a great deal of accountability. Bedroom programmers ended up running big companies, and a bunch of them failed. Skip to the early 00s and publishers are sending in external management, creating the perception that such types don't get games. And indeed, at that time they didn't, because games were new and not on the radar of many business graduates, let alone old hands. Business acumen and understanding of games will merge though; they aren't mutually exclusive.

It is indeed good to find a literate gaming forum.

The thing reminds me a lot of the hunters from Episode 2: Fucking ace, thanks

I think they're aiming to get most of their games done in 4 - 8 weeks.

Coupling came from Friends?

Thanks I got my cakes boingboinged!

A few things have been reminding me for the past few days just how utterly joyful the video to Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice is. I don't think anyone could play it as straight as Christopher Walken does

I think it's correct, but the biggest companies currently in the games industry may not be able/willing to do it off their own back, so to speak. As Raigan and Mare from Metanet put it here: Old cultures tend not to suit themselves well to new environments, or at least they adapt quite slowly. The tendency of certain publishers at the moment is to shut down studios and consolidate developers. When people like EA get bought by even bigger non-games fish who are sloshing in money, then I think you'll be absolutely right - the amount of risk on even a large team won't mean their collective head.

I gave up at the spike too. Especially as all the FAQs on the level said "Here's the best thing you can do... you're probably still fucked, but try it and hope for the best!". Yahoo had a really detailed guide, down to exactly what unit to produce when, where to move it, and what to fire at with it. At that point, I thought Dual Strike became a deeply unpleasant and tedious puzzle game rather than an enjoyable strategy one.

Scenes from films drawn with MS Paint. It's the best facebook group ever: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=4249694567

I think I'm just so spoiled by DVDs and <cough> video files, that 15 minutes or so of adverts an hour feels like an outrage

I'm guessing Sky charged a fucking fortune for easter weekend advertising set in the breaks for this, and might be worried about viewing figures? I don't think I've ever seen sky push something this hard. The "making of" program seems to be on even more than Top Gear. I'm getting really sick of it already. Every time you hit the back up button to get rid of the little "colour of magic" thingie in the top corner, it reappears in about a minute flat. Noone, ever get sky. I didn't by choice, just moved into a house with it, and the amount of advertising and sheer repetition is fucking terrible. I swear, it's damn close to Big Look Circus or Shiny Shiny Coin Coin.

That's a lot of verbiage, I'm afraid I scanned it. Jenova Chen did a rant at GDC, saying basically that he was excited about shooting Nazis when Wolfenstein first came out, but now it's boring. "Why can't people make more interesting stuff?", etc. There are a few prongs to that. As far as storytelling goes, we still don't have a clue how to tell stories properly with games. Noone does. Worlds in which events are dynamic don't mesh easily with linear stories. Valve are pretty much at the best compromise with HL2 right now. People are working on dynamic storytelling right now and have been for many years, it's a really fucking hard academic problem and I don't expect anyone can solve it and turn a profit on their time right now. Hence, it'll eventually come from a university first before any company manages it with a commercial project. Similarly, new rendering techniques are more likely to turn up at SIGGRAPH long before they're in a retail game - publishers tend not to take risks on R&D like that. If you feel jaded about games, you're not alone. I got that way in 2004 and would have followed a really different career path if Katamari Damacy hadn't perked me up. I recommend checking out the IGF nominees, and indie games in general. As smaller projects that can fail fast and often, they're much more suited to experimentation and interesting work, and until (and even after) all the big games industry players get bought by people like MTV, who can afford to experiment with a large team, indie games will mostly be where the interesting stuff is at. Seriously, check the IGF stuff out and take your time over it. Or PMOG. Or ARGs. Or My Life With Master. Or Chore Wars. video games have built a niche culture, yet in parallel with the net and new media they're ballooning up into a much larger industry that will have a different culture and do different things. That said, I'm still excited about video games as I know them, even though I'm bored of shooting Nazis. GTA IV is something I'm looking forward to for several reasons: Mainly that I still really enjoy that kind of gameplay, but also that I want to see it with new tech. Having seen Naturalmotion demo their stuff, I really want to play with it in a game.

Screw this It just interrupted a boss fight to tell me all of the cases were now inaccessible, unless I wanted to start again. Again. It might have given me some shred of information to tell me I needed to be somewhere specific at 6a.m., but the fonts for scoop cues and dialogue are too small to read on a non-HDTV, even when I squint and get close. The only people I want to take a sledgehammer to right now are the developers.

Yes, thank you Wrestle

Hahahaha XD

Having to start again at the early levels actually turned out quite satisfying. On one play through, I was intending solely to rack up PP in the tunnels for as long as possible then die and restart, but made a quick stop to grab a sledgehammer and beat the shit out of that annoying photographer