Nachimir

:( ARGH, fuck fuck fucking fuckheads. How can they end up as clueless as Ted Stevens?

Since you changed your avatar back, all I can hear now is David Hyde-Pierce saying "Tingle's Rosy Rupee land"

I do wonder how long it will take for someone to fuck up and carve a furrow into the side of a building with one. I think flying cars would be disastrous without computer control, and that saucer is going to be an expensive toy for people to go and play with in the desert.

I see The Amazing Screw-On Head was already discussed here before I came back. Reminded because I just got the DVD of the pilot from ebay, and it is excellent. It's worth seeing the art in such a non-youtube kind of way. Unfortunately, Mignola confirmed last November that Sci-Fi decided not to commission a series Also, I miss your Emperor Zombie avatar Rodi

I think most of this trailer has been done in machinima already... http://www.apple.com/trailers/newmarket/thenines/hd/

The link is fine. It's a new(ly announced) PC gaming blog set up by Kieron Gillen, Jim Rossignol, et. al. Edited quote in so noone thinks it's a warez site

Uh huh via Rock Paper Shotgun:

Is that a young Anne Widdecombe posing as the Mona Lisa?

yes

Well that *is* a tiny bit less worse, but: - Still requires a net connection (to activate, but also surely to get installs "back"). - Still won't play nice with anti-virus software. - Still won't play nice with windows. - Users have to uninstall BioShock before reinstalling windows? Brill; fruitless paranoia wasting their customer's time. - SecuROM has done precisely fuck all to stop the game from being cracked. It is an utterly pointless inclusion that adds nothing to 2K's security while annoying actual customers. Leaving my Windows install without anti-virus for an hour while I checked out the demo is one thing (though still a gamble on securom doing nothing worse to my system), but for a couple of weeks while I play through the game? No fucking way! It's not as bad as the Sony rootkits on music CDs thing, but it still stinks. Anyone who thinks DRM is worthwhile and has anything like a fighting chance must be drinking copious amounts of drugged Kool-Aid.

The ones with a whit of common sense are. Steam version? Still there, apparently.

I'm not interested in sticking it to them. Just avoiding malware.

In answer to the question in the thread title: 360. No way am I touching this for PC. I'd rather suck Satan's stinking cock while having P2PBSH tatooed on my forehead than install this on a PC. The demo wouldn't install unless AVG anti-virus was uninstalled (disabling it = still no go), and I'm guessing that has something to do with the stupid, awful SecuROM copy protection they've built into the game (even the Steam version). Furthermore, SecuROM demands that other, perfectly legit windows processes be stopped before it will work. Fuck your running processes, fuck your anti-virus, fuck your security, a total illusion of copyright security that punishes honest buyers seems to be more important. Reading blurbs about how such-and-such copy protection is invincible reminds me of hearing sci-babble in Star Trek: Sounds clever, but is completely imaginary and means fuck all. The only thing SecuROM, Starforce and the like cause is probably an increase in piracy. They're already catching a tremendous amount of shit on the 2K forums for it. I'm kind of amused by it, and can't believe that they seriously thought that, at this point, there wouldn't be pirate copies floating about that were more user friendly.

I was just askin'

aieee! Okay, now that's said, I actually have a question about Picross DS. Sudoku addicted me for a short while, until I realised solving them was just a dumb, brute force process of checks rather than something requiring much mental agility. Is Picross the same, or a better class of puzzle?

Gamasutra have a write up about Shafer's keynote: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15217 He didn't announce anything about rock and roll heaven or Jack Black

Bioshock PC demo: Needs AVG uninstalled before it will work. Runs surprisingly well on a low spec machine. Very pretty. Bit cheesy and feels like a bunch of other FPS games, but with better production standards. Has hilariously mystifying bit where protagonist finds a big, mysterious syringe full of some unknown substance and decides the best thing would be to shoot up with it right away.

I met my boss in a cafe a few weeks ago, and two incredibly-hot-and-maybe-16-but-probably-only-just-no-probably-a-bit-under-so-no-don't-you'll-go-to-special-hell girls decided to perch on tall stools behind him. He had one just over each shoulder for the whole meeting. So it's not that I can't appreciate the qualities of teenage girls, or that I feel guilty about my biology (hahaha ), but there's just a fairly intangible threshold, and that girl with pink hair is below it for me.

Those stats are for HL2EP1 though, not trends. I recently saw a speaker quote this stat without giving attribution, applying it to games as a whole. I asked her later where it was from and she said couldn't remember, and was kind of hoping the audience would answer that for her... Whether it seems likely that the majority of gamers leave them uncompleted or not, ep1 stats tell us nothing about games in general. I'm not saying it's the case, but there could have been some specific things about ep1 that really irked, bored or confused 60% of people. There could have been another game release that stole the incredibly limited play time of 20-30 somethings with young families. &c., &c.

I've been looking for news on that recently and not found anything edit: Why is the ": (" sad smiley a killer tomato?

The first video was mildly amusing until the RE5 bit. Where it became brilliant Yeah. I think I prefer it. I did like some of the images they used to put with articles, but trying to mimic a magazine format on the web has always seemed a bit "meh" IMO.

Indeed Thanks. I cleaned it up a little and turned it into a blog post, and looks like it might get turned into an article for somewhere or other. Made a pic for it I wanted to share: http://func-auton.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/dunceAI.jpg

Oh man. I read about that this morning and it made me giggle a little, but it didn't have any screenshots or links to video. That art quality. Hah. Haha. BWAHAHAHA! Hah. @ thread

I think I have a Steam account... it gets dusted off about once a year. I'll probably have to dig for it, but might show up there this week.

I actually really liked this game, especially the ends. I also think I got lucky; I got one bugged save game and occasional stutters, but it didn't actually crash once. ***Warning! this post is absolutely chuffing full of spoilers. So many I couldn't be arsed to pluck them out for spoiler tags*** I think this game does a lot with storytelling that I've not seen before. There's an absolute shitload of subtle stuff in it that I think is way more sophisticated than yer average game. The storyline that can explain everything is largely optional. You can complete the game without learning a thing about Strelok, the origins of the Zone, or who you are. Absolute knowledge of the plot is, effectively, a giant easter egg. That one of the missions gets you to loot the corpse of someone specifically identified, before you learn he was a former friend. This is a narrative trick I've not seen before in a game. The inside of the sarcophagus at Chernobyl is beautiful and feels almost sacred. I got the "I want to be rich" end first, and thinking back to some of the things I did to get all of the money I had, thought "Why wouldn't he deserve that?". Some of the endings are less clear, but all of them try to contextualise the way you've acted throughout the game, rather than giving you a clumsy multiple choice junction right at the end. The hidden, explain-all, noosphere plot just reeks of sci-fi bollocks, but who cares? The zone and c-consciousness project work as an allegory of hubris and sublimated aggression. That unearthing the full story of C-consciousness also reveals the story of the protagonist to be a tragedy is deftly done. That story needs to be hunted for, and both the folklore picked up from NPCs and the later mission structure divert attention from it. This gives the world a lot of internal consistency, given that the main purpose of the wish granter is to camouflage something else. You aren't fed privileged info, you really are dumped in that world with it's rules and conditions. That you only see the protagonist from outside at the very beginning, when he dies in a fight, or at an ending cutscene. Rumoured to be one of the greatest Stalkers in the Zone, at the rare times you do see his face, he's never doing the gruff alpha male thing, but instead looks weary, uncertain, and as if he might just break down and cry. As far as takes on celebrity/reputation go, in the West this perspective is pretty alien. That the joining c-consciousness project ending hinted at a lost friendship, and showed the kind of mutie dog I'd been murdering with no other option throughout the game as a domesticated animal. That the last, most positive ending was still shot through with moral ambiguity rather than any clear sense of right or wrong, and the mood of the character is simply relief at surviving. That it finished with a beautiful, symmetrical animal that looked a bit wrong after all of the lumpen mutants I'd been dealing with. It's a better game than many I've played. I think it borrowed some very good, subtle stuff from film, without sacrificing any of it's gameness. Instead of being told a story, you collect it as a series of chunks, and the way they add up is sometimes brilliant. Ultimately, the more comprehensive and less puzzling of the stories it offers depends on a very traditional game mechanic: Find the key to open the door. But by having just one key and one door tied to the fate and history of so much, it invests them with a hell of a lot of meaning. Maybe it's more my interpretation rather than the developer's intent, but this is the first game I've ever played where it felt like the nature of the world and the meaning of my actions in it were playing off each other.