Nachimir

Kind of, but that had angels on it, not serpents. Wisha though, plenty of similar symbolism around in the same period.

I'm really sick of the amount of shit Sony and Microsoft are talking about each other. At least Nintendo only resort to oblique jabs while also boosting their summer sales in a really weasely fashion ¬¬ http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6410&Itemid=2 What, me cynical? They may as well start jumping out at Sony and MS execs to poke them in the ribs.

Sorry. There is a proper e3 video site, but it only seems to have the most recent on there. gametrailers.com has them all.

I'm quite surprised too, but it seems possible they might be making an effort in that gameplay demo rather than the game itself. Everything else I've seen on it has been a massive explosions and bullets penis comparison. I wonder if they'll catch any shit for (it seems) reproducing the church at Krasne? Haze, Hellboy, meh. They both look like UT2004, with a load of extra shaders dumped on top in the former, and none in the latter. The Mario Bee is hilarious (Though generally, I'm easily pleased), Little Big Planet is getting even slicker and I can't wait to try it, but I bet there will be some absolutely terrible UGC out of it.

Quicksilver is awesome. I find myself really wanting it in Ubuntu and Windows. But oh god, don't get me started on hotkeys, especially hash and screen capture ones. I found a mac tutorial about them written in that really smug "macs are great" kind of way that started a sentence about the byzantine key combos with something like "It's as simple as just..."

This kind of thing should be included in the Develop 100. Definitely a ranking with some kind of poo metrics.

elmuerte is right, that's Team17 and they're still up in Yorkshire producing versions of Worms. What's level 17 in the thread title for, eh Miffy?

I find it kind of interesting that the new cabinet seems to be attempting to reclaim nationalism (Though not called that, usually "national pride" or "patriotism") and align it slightly left of centre. First they relaxed the rules on flying the Union Jack above government buildings: It used to be limited, but now they can fly it all the time. A lot of what's being said seem to contain suppositions of British identity, which is just not what came through the media before New Labour got into power. It's all kind of strange to me, as while growing up it always seemed like the UK had a cultural vacuum and the Union Jack was the BNP's flag rather than anything to do with the UK (For non-UK people, the BNP are kind of like the KKK are now: An organisation with a long history of racist nationalism that now attempts to hide it with PR). It doesn't spark any patriotic pride in me or anything, but I think it's fairly healthy for the govt. to reclaim certain symbols and words from the far right.

Yes. State law ensures a certain amount of independence, but it would have quite a vacuum to rush into if federal law ended. It seems that when culture clashes erupt violently, they end up in civil war or political devolution, with varying mixes of the two evident in Afghanistan, Iraq, former USSR territories (and present Russian ones), and the Balkans. The idea that such a thing as political devolution might be the only way forward for the US is pretty scary.

I agree, if "we're giving the market what it wants" were the be all and end all of it, the promotion arm of all marketing would be redundant, and it's so obviously not. Journos from UK tabloid The Sun often use it to defend their more objectionable and repulsive stories, but the fact is the paper recently launched and, unfortunately, to quite some extent succeeded with, a major campaign to win over more young male readers. The idea that big media is in touch with and serving a market is one of the more laughable fictions from the last century. The net is fortunately eating its lunch I don't buy this though. That's full of generalisations and there are simpler and more direct profits. While celebrity is indeed a very good distraction from more controversial events, it's not necessarily *why* it occurs and is reported on. The 80/20 rule has emerged in all kinds of fields and celebrity is no exception. From film stars and bands to product catalogues and services, a whole lot of things ride on and have been marketed by means of power laws. This was kind of a necessity of doing big business in the 20th century, with limited media channels equalling very large voices. The way to reach an audience has now changed, and few people understand it. But broadcast media is now losing time to MMOs, social networking and the web in general. While the net is decidedly flattening power laws and making the long tails profitable (Owain Bennallack had an excellent op-ed recently in UK game dev mag Develop, basically talking about the hope games have had of reaching the mass market: "Welcome. You just reached it. It's broken to pieces and is full of niches now. The glory days of the music top 40 are never coming back" ), vestiges of power laws remain and will probably continue to be a part of culture. The most powerful, the most beautiful, the wealthiest, the most influential, etc. We're just interested in that kind of thing, though often it's not polite to talk about that interest in the abstract. A lot of people don't want to believe it, I try to stay away from it myself. It simultaneously disgusts us in its shallowness, while at the same time nearly everyone would quite like to ride right to the top of a power law. It's not unusual for a social species at all. If you show male chimps a load of pictures, they're far more interested in ones that show powerful, dominant males and sexually aroused females. There's no chimpanzee conspiracy or group of shadow-chimps manipulating that to divert attention from decisions of a chimp council, and while similar may occasionally be the case with humans it's by no means the whole of it. Of course though, it *would* be nice to believe the whole phenomenon was entirely artificial

The current govt. of Russia could probably do with a lesson in not being an abusive petrocrat, though the most effective thing to do that would be distributed green power eating away every last bit of influence granted by Russian oil and gas reserves. The degree to which the Russian state works without the people it supposedly governs, as well as the general disregard for life there and fairly chronic widespread alcoholism in Russian culture (Apparently and unfortunately not just a stereotype) is quite shocking. (Caveat: I only have the latter parts second hand from people who've spent non-tourist time in Russia). Then there's China, which are not only hosting factories that are making knockoff AK-47s and missile launchers, but will also allow them to be exported to pretty much anyone. An increasingly brazen nuclear power and increasing ease of access to small arms are a couple of very disturbing world trends, and while there's a lot to learn from them, it seems like there are very few lessons to be "taught".

The video linked above is quite moving, but there isn't permanent profit from permanent war - there's pissing away a strong economy, but also the interactions it was based on. Speaking of which... I suspect enough corporations have had the good sense to jump on the bright green bandwagon that this won't be as bad or hopeless as you think. Plenty of engines of power don't follow Bushes lead, and if there's one thing Iraq has demonstrated to forward thinking people, it's exactly how impossible oil economies are going to become, if not environmentally then politically and economically. (It's not like it offsets a fraction of the evil Shrub has done, but I think he's accidentally closed some doors that humans could really do without anyway). Given what the administration has done to the economy, it seems inexhorable that US standard of living will decline, or at least recede relative to the rest of the world. I don't know how bad that could get though. The political situation has become bad enough that there are small movements for some states to secede from the union. Between that, e-voting controversy, an insane and dumb national security apparatus, and the unusually steep ideological divides around religion and sex, I can certainly see trouble at the Federal level, but individual states might prove to be fairly resilient once they realise they're on their own? Or perhaps people will start waving their guns about more

Obviously, the next few months are going to be a critical time for the Republican party

At risk of being hung from a lamp post... I found the bit with the rabbit very doable. I thought the rail slide just after it was utter shite though. I think 3d platforming is crap at best, and put up with it because everything else in Psychonauts was so good. The rail was too much though, after flying off the first jump and feeling my blood pressure rise for about the 30th time I just went and watched the ending and bonus film on youtube. All the rail sections throughout that game were pretty much automatic with fairly simple controls, then suddenly, wham. Jumps on tight curves that require precise aiming! I can't be arsed with that kind of game design. Edit: God damn. I just loaded it up, it suddenly made sense as just depending on timing, and I did it on my third attempt :/ Edit 2: Whoo! Finally completed it. The acrobatic section just after the rail sucked donkey balls, and while I don't want to punch Tim Schafer, maybe a chinese burn or something... nah. The art style and humor keep on making up for annoying bits. Also, the very last boss fight is a piece of piss with upgraded invisibility Edit 3: I see Spaff, Yufster, Marek, and Stefan Zivadinovic so far. How many Thumbs staff are thanked in the credits?

Yeah, GTA alright. It's also starting to show some of the ropeiness and quirks that mark games in general: its really easy to tell it looks so slick because of materials rather than poly counts, etc. I'm expecting dumb AI. Can't wait to pick this game apart; I get on quite well with the GTA formula.

Play.com had this for £13 in their sale the other day, but it turns out that by "in stock" they actually meant "out of stock". I'm looking forward to it...

I have a cautious optimism about Brown, largely because he seemed to keep a fairly low profile during the years everyone was screaming "Scumbag! Pigfucker!" at Jack Straw, Tony Blair, John Prescott, and David Blunkett. My optimism is ointment with a few big flies in it though: - He's reportedly an incredibly clever man, and I hope the extent to which it's been said is true, but it might easily be more overblown PR. - So much is out of his control in a globalised system that without research it's going to be hard to know exactly what he is and isn't directly reponsible for, even before sugar coated PR is dripped all over it. - The extent to which he gets how the world is changing remains to be seen.

I think this is a good point, and a far deeper issue than most would suspect. My boss and I were talking about this last week. Playing a game is very, very different to watching it being played. We'd both played a bit of Gears of War the previous weekend, and had similar experiences. I found out how to use the chainsaw by accident and spent five minutes trying to do it to everything, cheering every time it worked. The guy playing with me was watching it and shooting sidelong glances at me. In my mind it was "Yay! I triggered something novel!". In his mind he saw someone who appeared to be thinking "Yay! Blood! Guts! Chainsawmuthafucka!". If I saw the same thing in a film (made to look real or as obvious CGI), I'd very likely just go "Eugh!". I'm not a fan of watching violence at all. Likewise my boss got a "What *are* you playing?" from his wife upon performing a kerb stomp. The context of any action in a game is completely different; To a player it's nothing like seeing it in American History X, but to a spectator it might be. The question is, does the action in a game affect people more or less than the same thing in a film? Intuition seems to suggest more, but my boss and I actually think it's less because we can see the difference in our reaction to the two. I've always been wary of people who really enjoy watching violence in films, but never had the same qualms over gamers.

Suggest hugging them, followed by "Hi, I'm a pickpocket" or "Hi, I have tuberculosis".

Aw man, I guess I always miss that. Just Metro. Once upon a time, I used to hand out flyers at night for the cookie club in nottingham. The best thing about it was the sheer badass apathy of the drunk people I was meant to be "marketing" it to. You could say anything and they wouldn't hear. Strange cult. "cheers mate". Dead tree? Waste paper? Sticky dancefloor? Fuck the environment? Nuke the whales. Burn a tree. More clearcutting. Tax breaks for the rich? While I was flyering with a chinese guy: Phillipino husbands? cheers mate (you bastard, he said). Reconstituted woodpulp coated in inks wrung from molluscs and similar bivalves? (Nicked from the inside cover of Amiga Power) How much wood would a wood chuck chuck, etc. Free piggyback rides? Free kiss? Free Nelson Mandela? Get run over by a bus? Shitty nightclub? Learn how to kill people and get away with it? "Cheers mate". Douchebag? "Cheers mate". These are all flyerisms we actually did at the time. My favorites were a series based around serial killers: Go karting with Fred West? Candlelit dinner with Myra Hindley? Tandem skydive with Jeffrey Dahmer? Tai Chi with Peter Sutcliffe? About 1 in 100 actually paid attention. The best was when a guy replied "Dyke!" to a punk girl and she replied that if he came closer and said that, she'd bite his bollocks off and spit them in his mother's face. He was so cowed. It was ace, and I wish I'd filmed every minute.

Because I was one but left, they see me as some kind of devil spawn now. So much fun when they knock on the door

By far the most annoying thing on a mac is the lack of easy access to "¬¬"

These are absolutely required Also, the entire story about Spore delayed until '09 was just a rehash and misinterpretation of the (much) earlier news about a delay until fiscal '09. A bunch of game news sources are going "oops" this morning.

My brother's way of dealing with that kind of thing: Without slowing down, point directly at their face and accompany it with a loud "NO!"

Episode 3: http://www.cmd-q.com/consolevania/s1e3.html 8:50 in. I wondered where that came from.