Nachimir

Yes, and pureile boobs aside, a few of the costumes and characters were spectacularly designed.

That is all. You cannot bait me.

Yeah, you're right. I find it a little like ignoring the hype around games: By completely divorcing the first three star wars films from the latest offerings, the books, mechandise, etc., I still like them a fair bit but automatically have low expectations for anything connected. Even that is still something I find funny though. Alice Taylor regularly posts especially tacky bits of Star Wars merch at Wonderland. It gives me exactly the same reaction as Vader and Yoda in Soul Calibur: WTF!? quickly turning to hysterical laughter

It is a bit shocking and car-crash-like to see stuff like this, but overall I'm with the "It's funny" camp. http://www.videosift.com/video/Robot-Chicken-Luke-Learns-the-Truth

It seems there is. I've not encountered that with Soul Calibur, as among my beat-em-up playing friends it's always come third behind Tekken and King of Fighters. Tekken has some long running, melodramatic story arcs threaded through the entire series, and the degree to which a few of my mates care about it is a bit much on occasion. Still, even they point and laugh at fanboys who take it to much bigger extremes. There's huge concern about universe integrity among fanboys, and like you and Vimes I feel quite surprised that that's often attached to pretty weak universes and characters. The Halo games strike me as similar, and I suspect rabid fanboy loyalty in general has more to do with the peers who share it than the apparent focus.

Here it is, another storm of conflict around your posts. I initiated it this time, but if you can't see that you tend to be the common factor, there's nothing more to be said. You're not listening. It's been mutual. I'm not going to waste any more time on this.

It's not an endearing trait, you're like a dog with a bone. What I'm talking about is your propensity to need the last word, your tendency to assume you're on higher moral/intellectual ground, your raking of minutiae, and your utterly dogged persistence in insisting that you are right about just about anything, no matter how many counter arguments are presented. I've watched you do it to a bunch of people while I've been here, and what I mean by "recently" is that it's been more noticeable of late. I swear - - it's just like you're paying lip service to the concept. Now, the reason this has been mentioned at all, is that a few people seem to have been biting their tongues, of which I am one. Noone has wanted to be drawn into one of the recursive, argumentative vortices that tend to surround your posting here. As Wrestle said above, you've posted some good commentary at times, but right now you seem driven by antagonism, superiority and conflict.

DO NOT WANT

Phew! Things were getting a bit to complex for a while, I'm glad we can now get rid of all those shades of grey ---- Seriously: Yes Thunderpeel, what's up with that? Recently, you seem obsessed with being right.

Pics of Ginger playing WoW in a nappy? Google is rubbing it's sweaty palms together

I wouldn't know a bunraku puppet if someone made it pinch my arse in the street, but it's worth pointing out that the examples given in the chart above are all applicable to the field in which the hypothesis originates: cybernetics. It was first observed in Japan in the 1970's, so CGI is just a much later field in which it also seems to be applicable. brkl, the UV is through and through a hypothesis, not fact. Nonetheless, adverse reactions are observed to many different near-real representations of other humans, and this doesn't tend to occur with representations of other species or objects. To take a couple of counter examples though, vets and geologists might disagree - what fools you or I won't convince a specialist so well, and due to the quirks of us being a social species, we're all specialists in other humans. The closest anyone has come to explaining the why of it is that near-real representations trigger an adverse response originally developed to make humans keep their distance from ill people. This idea is interesting, but pretty damn far from proven though. The negative reaction also has subjective boundaries and lifespan. The reaction isn't uniform from one person to the next, and even if someone has it, they may get used to it during the course of a film. Polar Express makes my skin crawl to this day, but I soon got used to the characters in the Final Fantasy films. Others have reacted very differently.

Corrected

I kind of feel the same way about Art Lebedev as 3D Realms, but more so. Nothing they do ever gets out on time; the site is full of overshot release dates. However, the release of these would totally redeem them

Yeah, piss poor. I ended up just equipping each squad member with the best equipment only for the things they were skilled at + an upgrade effective against geth, keeping some anti-organic ammo about too, then selling pretty much everything else. The only saving grace is the red and green colour change on stat bars allowing easy comparisons - sometimes lower numbered weapons are much better than higher numbered variants of different models (IIRC there was an VIII pistol I found that was still better than most of the X ones, likewise with armour).

I'm slightly impressed that they got the damn thing made, finally. Art Lebedev have been whoring out the concept work on that for years. After getting everyone very excited about it last year, they said "Erm, actually, the displays are only going to cover half of the keys, and they'll be black and white... and it'll still cost around $1000" or some such. That may even have been after they started taking preorders. There was so much backlash, I think they pretty much had to deliver on it or shut down

I got used to the Mako really quickly, though I can see why Ben Croshaw described it as handling like a fat man on a unicycle. In addition to the horrible way it drives, he way the turret works is very like the vehicles from UT2004 - very annoying when you can point the crosshair at something but the turret shoots high because of the way the vehicle is oriented on the terrain. Weak. I played through as an infiltrator because I knew that would suit me through and through - that said the class doesn't exactly involve much stealth, just evil weapons that can pop enemies quite easily. A magic user is great to have as a squadmate because of the way they'll take a strong enemy and neutralise them by pitching them into the air (Singularity is good fun too - it will turn a group of enemies into sitting ducks). Infiltrator with upgraded sniper rifle and pistol (skills and hardware + weapon upgrades) means you can dismantle pretty much anything at all ranges; worth getting sniper rifles skill full because it completely gets rid of the movement when you're using the scope. Ashley and Liara seem to be the best squadmates, because respectively they have the highest ratings for gun combat and magic. There are a bunch of all rounders on offer, but they all seem a bit meh in comparison to pure specialists (i.e. Liara and Ashley would survive most confrontations and come out still fighting, but Garrus and Tali, for instance, would drop like flies at the merest whiff of combat, even at the end of the game).

Happy new year everyone I had a video in mind for this thread, to go with Wrestle's Christmas one, but it's nowhere online It was (i think) a kitkat advert that involved a man and his young son putting milk out for a hedgehog. When they go to the window that night and switch the outdoor lights on, they see a bald man in his underpants, on his knees lapping from the bowl.

I watchd all of Jekyl recently, and it's okay. Ian Nesbitt usually seems to play dishevelled, good natured middle aged men, but he takes on a suave and sinister role quite well as Hyde. Some of his dialogue is excellent. I think it's worth watching, even though it unfortunately goes from amazing for the first few episodes then has a really camp end.

I guess they're not "pissing away" that much of it given the way their projects tend to have skeleton crews. It's a bad sign in terms of business. The relationship between time, quality, and money is a strange one. That guy's conclusion is: I can't disagree with him from an artistic point of view, but... Blitz Games and Oxygen Games are both (UK based) combined developers and publishers, the latter publishing other people's work as well as developing in house, and Blitz concentrating on very diverse in house development. Blitz have four divisions and a headcount of around 200. They don't license their technology, they've acquired other firms in the past five years, and they're still expanding. Oxygen also don't license their own technology, they have about 35 of their own staff across both development and publishing, and are expanding aggressively worldwide. Both are prolific, but they churn out fairly cheap and cheerful games. I really want that quote above to be true, but when Transformers can get to number one (and be produced by the same company that did Lego Star Wars!!), it's a little bit heartbreaking. It's possible to do good business and good games, but very few companies manage it. The way business, products, and the market interact for the games industry just seems mental.

I thought Transformers was fun, in a really dumb kind of way. It is Michael Bay. As far as faithfulness to the original goes, it's a travesty. And yeah, any Video game character artist could have told them characters need to have unique outlines It succeeded in making me laugh a few times during the first half, and as far as the more serious second half goes, maybe I judged more favourably because I got to see a special cut - the one where the later action scenes are really short due to falling asleep

Damn. Never heard of the books before, but the trailer made this look like it might be interesting. Sounds like it will annoy me in exactly the same way the pacing did in X-Men 3.

Woo for Christmas bonus 360's! I probably wouldn't have bought one, but I must admit I'm liking it a lot. Just finished Mass Effect, and have Dead Rising and Crackdown to go. As well as a huge pile of games to borrow from my boss. The first part of Noveria was indeed pretty meh , probably the worst thing for them to open up after the first part in the Citadel. Overall I thought it was a great game. I just finished it with normal combat, completing all of the sidequests I could find, which took nearly 40 hours. It was good I had the same problem as you with the fighting once I met a lot of coordinated rocket drones, but the abilities really make the combat flow quite easily. I've never played KOTOR, but the first thing my housemate said on seeing me play Mass Effect was that it looked a lot like it. It kind of seemed like a few things got a bit ropey toward the end of the game - the way objectives were referred to and tied together in the journal for some of the last missions was occasionally a bit strange, though never misleading or impenetrable. Some of the narrative things near the end were also quite tacky I thought: It didn't stick as badly for me as for Dr.Gash though I can't believe just how many SF cliches it hit. Slavering biological threat? Check. Army of rogue AI? Check, x2. Ancient progenitor species? Check. Species extinction? Check. Saving the galaxy? Check... it's space opera squared. The planets all being bland heightmaps was a bit meh - no interesting rock formations, no lakes, rivers, oceans, volcanism, caves... very few interesting things at all, as well as all of the installations and ships using the same layouts and art assets was a bit meh, but then again they were all disposable dungeons, not worth the development time to make them really unique. Inventory management and selling could have been easier, given the amount of equipment lying around to pick up, the lists could really do with some filters. There are more gripes I can't be arsed to go into, because despite all of this, I really, really liked it. The level where and the architecture for the Mako segment of Ilos, as well as the Thai landscapes on Virmire were all good. I was impressed with the art and variety on all of the main missions. I reloaded and played through a couple of sections twice to mess with the dalogue tree. I really like the system of left = slower, right = faster, up = cooperative, down = antagonistic, but after trying to play through a few conversations using completely different answers, I found they all tend to elicit exactly the same responses and outcomes . It seems the only real influence they have most of the time is on your paragon/renegade score. Overall, I felt like it was giving an illusion of influence most of the time. Nonetheless, with it succeeded in throwing up the odd hard choice nicely tied to the narrative. I also like that picking charm options had an effect later on.

It's going to be like the BAFTAs all over again!

Good point. I'm being far too harsh on 3DR given what they did with Max Payne and Prey. Of course it's good when people have time and resources to do the projects they want, and execute well on them. I just think there's something a bit suspicious about the nature of development and business around DNF (and the dev history of Prey). Maybe I'm infected with business (and will soon begin to "realise synergies" and "leverage" things), but it seems to me that dragging development through several generations of technology without hitting the point where you can grow a team and crank it out is pretty sloppy. At the very least, it's appallingly dumb/naive to announce projects then find you haven't got the resources to follow through on them. Again, I'm being pretty harsh. There could be a lot of reasons for this, from not finding the right financial backing, wanting to hold on to the IP, etc. This comment from the dev history of Prey is interesting: It could be read a lot of ways. The pattern put out by 3DR projects is one of perpetual delays and projects being reworked for successive generations of technology. It can be viewed as risky, courageous experimentation, or just sloppy. I'd buy their games, but not their shares. There's something awry. Human Head Studios were "commissioned" to make Prey. That suggests that 3DR have a humongous pot of cash somewhere, but it seems unlikely. I find it really hard to believe they have enough cash banked to develop a current generation game - profits from the mid 90s? No. Profits from Max Payne? Doubt they'd be sufficient. Profits from the mobile Duke games? Definitely not. That suggests that though 3DR had intellectual property rights for Prey, Human Head were probably able to negotiate royalties much larger than normal ("normal" being "nonexistent" for nearly every game). Given their publishing history since 2000 it seems like a miracle they can afford to do any game development at all. Added to this comment on the Wii it just murders any confidence I might have had in them: Though they make good games, they're not very good at producing them. Everything suggests that 3DR are pretty bad at business. Lack of business skills is a major reason for the UK now having around 150 development studios as opposed to >300 around the year 2000 - while many developers were good at making games in the 90s, they became big business and the bar was subsequently too high for a lot of developers to get over (It's important to clarify that the remaining studios employ many more people than they did in 2000). While the US isn't exactly like the UK or EU, games still went through the same changes. Epic and Id were around before that time, and got through it by licensing technology. In this respect 3DR seem to be a real anomaly. Nonetheless I've warmed to them after reading more about the studio. They obviously care a huge amount for their projects and will do anything to keep them alive, including scaling a team down to just one person. If they were owned by any other publisher rather than also being one themselves, DNF and Prey would both have been canned years ago and the studio probably shut down. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is another good example - it was a ropey game that got out of development hell eventually and only became stable with the later graphical bolt ons turned off, but the cultural outlook the developers infused it with turned it into a compelling game for me. I really hope they're doing something amazing with DNF, but as far as video games go, up against things like Mass Effect and Half Life 2 a character like Duke just seems a decade out of date. Then again, a games festival director said to me this year "You and I, are perhaps not the best barometers of popular taste" So there you go. I've thought about it quite a bit and do have reasons for being so negative, but I'm also very sorry if I've pissed on anyone's joy over this. I didn't mean to.

I thought season one got a bit ridiculous toward the end, but still enjoyed it a lot. Cheers for the recommendation Yufster I just watched the second season last week and thought it was even better than the first. They did a great job on developing the characters and followed through on some tough writing decisions. Really looking forward to S3