twmac

Miffy, you need to finish Earth Defense Force the last boss is great (Try it on Hard or Hardest and it becomes Epic). I still need to beat that last level on Inferno and find the last 3 weapons so that I can get every achievement. Games to finish as soon as I get back to England: - Condemened: Criminal Origins (the guy I'm working with has just discovered it and reminded me how much I enjoyed the game too) - COD2 - The Suffering: The ties that bind

Just watched 'The Mist' Frank Darabont (Shawshank Redemption and Green Mile) directs arguably the best film version of a Stephen King novel, full stop. Thomas Jane is well cast and good in the central role (which leads me to believe that he can pick out a good script but not always a good director) and everyone of the support cast plays their part well (my hat firmly off to Gena Rowland). There is nothing sentimental about this film either, the twists and turns are good and even if you have read the short story it is based on there are still plenty of bits that deviate from it (without spoiling the mood) to keep you entertained. I'm tempted to say that it is one of the rare films (Starship Troopers, High Fidelity) that I think is better than the story it is based on, which is something because I loved the story. There is also a nice nod to John Carpenter at the beginning, as he made the film 'The Fog' causing this adaptation to be called 'The Mist' instead. Also just finished 'Lord of War' and 'The last king of Scotland' both good.

With that scenario you end up like Gamespy, a place I trusted, bar reviews on EA projects or Nokia ones. Gamespy are so horrifically biased when it comes to them that it makes me sad. Shame really as I do like the Planet Fargo articles.

But when done right (or even badly in my case) they are gold. Just re-watched the reel for Fallout 3 the music playing inside the burnt-out vehicle. If they manage to get that kind of atmosphere into the actual game I really can't wait.

Thanks, I had already figured that out. I just liked the original format of separate chapters for Arcade games, then a separate selection for demos. As I see it I'm being a little reactionary to the change and will probably have no problem with it in about a couple of months but right now it grates. Thanks for the advice I have emailed my friend, he is one of those steadfast Quebec types so I can imagine him giving Microsoft shit for no other reason than to be right.

I just got this email from an ex-workmate in Canada it tickled me no end to read about the devotion to this game (it is a tad long): You know about the canadian release got delayed, right? They delayed it until december 19th or something. W. (name has been omitted to hide the true identity) just said "That's UNACCEPTABLE!" And the reason is because they're running out of copies enough for all the reserved pre-ordered copies for the states. So, W. called me from work, while I was sleeping at home cuz I work evening shift. He said "M., this is an emergency." And I thought it was something work-related. But then he continued "You know about how the canadian release got delayed, right? This Tuesday is the day of the US release. Do you know where this conversation is going?" Me: "You want me to drive you there to be in the queuing line to buy Rock Band" W.: "Exactly" Me: "Alright" Then I hung up and went back to sleep. He and a friend planned this out with several printed maps to stores location where they sell on first come first served. Our team are going to the New York state (Plattsburgh and around) while G. team would be covering the Vermont state (Burlington and around). Monday night, I finished work at midnight, picked up W. and our friend P., we went to my parents' place to rest and prepare ourselvs to leave in early morning. By the way, my parents' on vacation and I'm not allowed to use their car for my own interest except for groceries or things needed for the house. I took the car to cross the border. Bad me. We left at around 3am. At 4:45am, we went to an 24-hour Walmart and bought Rock band, the LAST one they had. They had only 10 copies, and the 9 others were also bought by quebecers too, haha. They took OUR Rock Band and delayed our canadian release. We're only taking back what's rightfully ours. After W. got his copy of Rock Band, we still had to stay around because P. wanted two further copies. Before going to Wal-Mart, we went to Best Buy first to see if there would be a queuing line, only to get chased out by a rent-a-cop scouting around the areas. There was no queuing line. At 5am, we just had to waste time in Wal-Mart and rest a bit in the car until 8am, when K-Mart opens. At 8:12am, we went to K-Mart and, alas, it was too late. They had only 4 copies (2 PS3s and 2 360s), and there were already 3 quebecers who had bought them. Only one copy of PS3 version was left, but we wanted the 360 ones. So we went to Best Buy, still no queuing line, but we saw some guys sitting in their car that was parked nearby. They looked like Rock Band buyers. So despite the very bad weather (slushy rain type), P. and W. immediately went outside to stand at the door to start the queuing line. The guys inside the car, after noticing them, went outside as well to follow them. I stayed in the car in the warmth. These guys became friends soon after. We waited until 8:30am, and the shopping mall that has Best Buy opened up, so we could be in the queuing line inside the mall. At this point, I also joined them inside. While waiting, we realized that these guys aren't competing with us to get Rock Band because they wanted the PS3 version. So we were cool. We told them about the last one at K-Mart, so one of them went and bought it, but the other two guys still wanted their own copies. At 9am, the store finally opened, but they said they haven't received the shipment yet and if they still don't have it until 9:30am, they will give us raincheck with a $25 certificate. At 9:30am, still nothing, so we got our rainchecks and we decided to go to another store. But just before going, I decided I wanted to check out the mall a bit while W. and P. were in the car, planning our next destination. As I explored the mall, I found a store that actually had Rock Band. So I came back outside running and yelling to them "Guys, I found a store that has Rock Band!!" Then I looked at our new friends and added "Only the 360 version though, they don't have the PS3 version, sorry guys!" As soon as P. heard me, he yelled "WHERE???" and started to run toward the store called FYE (For Your Entertainment) like an olympic sprint champion. As I arrived last to the store, I clearly saw P., with his credit card in hand, and 2 Rock Bands at the counter of the cash register, all ready to buy them. The cash register shoed up $211 or something for each Rock band (tax included). Something's wrong... $169 plus tax did not add up to $211, it should’ve be $183. The store manager said, "it's $199" WHAT?? What a rip-off, the other stores sell them at $169. He said "There is no suggested price for this, so $199 is our price." You should have seen P.’s frowning face when he heard that. It meant, if he was buying them, it was gonna be about $75 bucks more expensive (considering he's buying two). After quick meditation, he decided he's buying them. Better pay a bit more for guaranteed ownership than looking elsewhere else and not able to find them. After buying them and bringing the two rock bands back to the car. We felt bad for our PS3 friends, so we wanted to help them out by showing them where to go. We gave them our maps and called a few places to see if they still had available PS3 versions. All the places that we called were either sold out or not selling the PS3, until the last store we called. Bingo, they had like 10 copies. We showed them directions and we bid them good luck and farewell, as they start rushing out to their car. We went back to look through the mall further As we walked further inside the mall, one of the PS3 friends ran back to us, yelling: "GUYS, THE BEST BUY HERE FINALLY RECEIVED THE SHIPMENT OF ROCK BANDS!!" Holy fuck. P. and W. immediately went back to the car to grab the two rock band that they just bought at FYE and returned them to the rip-off store. They then bought rock bands at best buy with the raincheck, and received the two $25 certificates. So not only was it $30 cheaper for each rock band, but they also got $25 gift certificates, Times TWO. So they were saving $125. At this point, I said "hey guys, since I'm doing you guys a HUGE favor and drove you all the way here for Rock Band that I am NOT even buying it for myself, how about you guys give me those certificates? After all, it's not like you're losing anything, you weren't supposed to be getting these certificates in the first place. They agreed and gave them to me. Sweet, I got a $50 certificate. I bought Mario Party DS and a 2gb USB key. We got back across the border and played a couple of songs before I had to go to work.

Well that's just pants. Downloaded it and the only thing I don't like is the new sytem for downloaded games. They have cobbled together all your demos and XLA titles, this I find annoying as it means if I have downloaded full length games a long with full XLA titles they are all in the list together. I preferred them to be separate.

EB Games in Canada are doing 20GB hard drives for about 50 dollars cdn, haven't seen any 120Gb for sale though. There is a particular make of hard drive that you have to use with the 360, someone told me it was a particular brand of laptop hard drive.

Yeah Miffy, this seems to be true. A friend of mine just recently had his system refurbished and when he put the Hard drive into the new console (they didn't fix it they sent him another), unless he is logged into Xbox LIVE, most of his games revert back to Trial versions even when he has the gamer profile he used to download them signed in. Which is absolutely rubbish.

It is kind of funny that so many posts are about requiring originality in games and yet the talk of recent has been about Guitar Hero 3 and Call Of Duty 4. COD4 might have taken a new look at the genre, but lets face it when you play it on Veteran the same AI problems that have plagued the game since the beginning are there. Enemies who see no one but you even when you are crouched down and there are 15 of your teammates are standing in front of you providing 'supporting' fire. Teammates who supply the least amount of support I've seen in any game. Even the guys in Earth Defence Force are more useful, and if those guys piss me off I can just shoot them unlike COD which initiates an instant failure. And then Guitar Hero 3, new songs, great, but really, how much innovation can there be in a game that relies entirely on binary routines? It is breaking games down to the most basic 1010101010 formula and there are now three iterations of it? All published by Activision, it says a lot when the two biggest third party publishers rely on rehashes of franchises to see them through. Don't get me started on WOW, I already have a job that I do during the day, why the hell would I want to go home and pay to do another one? Rant ended. Am having bad day.

Agreed. Someone I know cracked a joke after SCI and Eidos got together that at this rate, in ten years time EA would have total control over the publishing duties after everyone bonded together in a The-Blob-meets-Glen-Gary-Glen-Ross style merger. Maybe he was having a vision. The bigger companies get the more they lose touch with what it is they are supposed to be doing (other than making money). Looking forward to World of Hawk's Star Duty though, that game will be amazing.

I laughed so hard on the woman standing up for women's equality on the cervical cancer section, unfortunately I was eating some chinese at the same time so in a bid to hold it in I sniggered and managed to shoot Sweet and Sour sauce through my left nostril. That is the best link I've had in a while.

Yeah I suppose, I just liked some of the out-and-out ridiculous situations. I've always been a sucker for it in Books and films where all of a sudden the protagonist breaks down the wall between them and the reader. You know, when the character in a film has been playing it straight for ages and then all of a sudden just looks into the camera and appears to acknowledge that there is an audience out there watching them (this is why the awful Christopher Lambert and Mario Van Peebles vehicle: Gunmen holds a place in my heart) Fall Out 2 did stuff like that and if 1 did that then I missed those moments in more ways than one.

Thanks for the tip-off. It was Majesco (remember them?) that published Phantom Dust in the US + Canada and it did appallingly. I picked it up new for 20 dollars. It is fully backwards compatible with the US 360s and you can still even go online and duel with other people (me and a friend got together and arranged a specific time to be online it was sweet). If it does come out on the download, I recommend going into the main hall with the head of the base and just leave yourself there with the music turned up, that track is haunting.

If you happen to in New York or near New York in the during the coming weekend, or even if you know anyone in New York. THE BLIP FESTIVAL 2007 THURSDAY NOV 29TH - SUNDAY DEC 2ND. EYEBEAM - 540 WEST 21ST STREET (BTWN 10TH AND 11TH AVES) www.blipfestival.org The BLIP FESTIVAL 2007 is a four-day music and multimedia event, focusing on the modern artistic exploration of primitive video game and home computer technology and featuring 40 musicians and visualists from around the world. The BLIP FESTIVAL showcases artists adopting and repurposing familiar but forgotten hardware - such as the Commodore 64, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Atari game console and home computer line, and the Nintendo Game Boy - exploring their untapped potential and unique aesthetic character. The festival's nightly concerts and daytime screenings, workshops, and presentations are supplemented by B I T M A P : as good as new, an adjunct visual art exhibition, held at acclaimed Brooklyn gallery vertexList. The Blip Festival 2007 offers a fascinating cross-section of the chiptune musical aesthetic and related low-bit visual art, in an explosive event taking place at the epicenter of the creative world. The festival will host evening concerts on all 4 nights, as well as daytime workshops and screenings on Saturday and Sunday. For full schedule and lineup, check out the website: http://www.blipfestival.org/schedule.html To buy tickets for individual nights: http://www.smarttix.com/show.aspx?showCode=TAN9 To buy festival passes: http://www.smarttix.com/package.aspx?showcode=BLI44 It has music that goes through the gamut of gabba, tecno, Drum and Bass, even a little folk accompanied by 8bit synthesizers and excessive amounts of gameboys. I went last year and it was genius, I got amazingly drunk and saw acts from Japan, Sweden, America, Canada and a few other more random places. If they are there again the pick were Moto Kick, Bit-Shifter, Bubbly fish, and Coova.

None at the moment. The line-up also seems to have a very different bunch, with most of the people from last year not making an appearance. The New York staple will be there who were all good, and it should at least be interesting who is doing their stuff this year. I really wish I wasn't in LA right now, I would love to go to New York for that festival again.

@F3 - My only concern is that Bethesda have said that they are eschewing the humour from the second one as they don't think it fits the world. I really liked the dark comedy moments in the game as well as the random moments where the nod at the player by acknowledging that it is indeed, just a game. Apart from that it could be very promising I especially like the plan to keep the game turnbased on most of the combat sections. Deus Ex 3 could be awesome but it will all depend on whether they get the right people. Eidos really knows how fuck up development.

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that the software support was removed to save money.

I second Miffy recommendation of Buck 65, the 'This right here is Buck 65' album is a more acoustic take on a lot of his stuff. Track 7 'Out of Focus' is very touching. Not for everyone but Romperprop was introduced to me by a friend and it is the best example of metal bands not taking themselves too seriously but being brutally heavy at the same time. Also listening to random Orbital and it makes me feel very cheery along side Vitalic 'Ok Cowboy' which helps me write bugs at work. Finally tunage, which I highly recommend is the sound track to 'Phantom Dust' there are some really good instrumental tracks mixing modern electronica and classical themes.

The original US and Japanese versions had the Emotion chip in it so it was like having a PS2 in the machine at the same time. The chip was removed and it ran the games using emulation meaning that it suffers from a lot of the problems that the 360 Backwards compatibility suffers from (Lag, loading issues, occasional crashes on some games while others run perfectly). Apparently the newest system has had even this removed so as 'supply the demands of current PS3 buyers', apparently people buying the PS3 right now don't want BC they just want it to be cheaper. Scarily this seems to be partially true as a few of my friends got a lot more interested when the price dropped. Mind you they didn't know that BC had been lost, or that there are less USB ports and a smaller Hard drive...

I've been watching this game for a while now, and with the special going on in the local GameStop (buy two games and get a third free) I decided to not bother waiting for the reviews and picked this up alongside Halo 3 and Stranglehold. I'm glad I didn't bother reading the reviews as it is currently getting slated http://xbox360.gamespy.com/xbox-360/blacksite-area-51/836496p1.html Some of the criticism seems pretty fair, the attacks on the jaggies and worse some of the loading times between levels are ridiculous (even if there is no visible In-game loading on huge levels). The review doesn't mention some of the terrible texture pop-up in the first level, which makes no sense as it is one of the most confined. However, I really liked the plot and pacing, the game allows the user to wander through the cutscenes, in a Half Life and Chronicles of Riddick style meaning that you are never left twidlling your thumbs waiting for the FMV to finish. The VO stuff is not anywhere near as quiet as the review implies and I actually liked the one liners, even if the characters are the usual bunch of testerone filled beefcakes. The set pieces are good so far and the destructible scenery is very satisfying. It is also nice to have team mates who don't suck and do things like take cover, return fire and actually respond to your commands with some degree of competency. The morale system does work and you really notice the difference on the harder levels and sections when your team is backing you up. I'm just under half way through the game after about 3 hours play which suggests a short playthrough but with achievements for the hardest difficulty and collectibles that I missed I'll probably go back and play it at least one more time. Most of the stuff is forgivable (the minor C Class issues throughout the game suggest that the development team just didn't have the time to optimise) but the only design decision that pissed me off (Loading times are drinking times) was that clicking down on the left stick does not lock you into crouch, as soon as you let go you are standing again which makes it a pain to take cover while under fire. I would recommed this if you can find it a little cheaper than full price or on the GameStop offer.

Ahh... Sony and your European pedants: http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=88052

Then why is it not due out until next year? Have they managed to get it back on track? Good for them if they have. Epic Games have a limited console exclusive deal with Sony, the reason the 360 version has been delayed is because Sony have paid for it to not be released on any other console for several months (a similar policy they had with Rockstar when San Andreas was released). It is usually the other way round in terms of efficiency BTW, Sony America's QA are pretty slack and the European division are total pedants.

True, but when you can get simultaneous console/PC releases with Bioshock. Yet Unreal Tournament 3 is out soon on PC and delayed until next year on PS3. Stranglehold is out on both 360 and PC but is taking upwards of a month and half and counting to come out on PS3? That doesn't inspire me with a lot of confidence as to the designof the PS3 being all that well thought out.

Fair points, but have you looked at the number of games that actually go online on PS3 in contrast to X360? Both VF5 and Virtua Tennis 3 are online on 360 and not PS3. This stemming from the fact that the servers are generally run by the developers and yet Sony still has very demanding requirements from the online service. Microsoft may have the same amount (well more actually) of ridiculous requirements that need to be fulfilled before they will allow the release of the game, but from a developer perspective it will still be cheaper to implement an online component for the console as Microsoft handle the servers themselves. The advent HOME is, if anything, going to make the online prospects on PS3 for games even worse. That being because I suspect that there will be a whole new set of requirements that the game will have to support before being allowed on the market. A fact which I suspect is why HOME has been delayed, and also why Sony have stopped bragging about supporting 40 players in online matches at once. In short, Sony are lying through their teeth about so much at the moment that buying the console now when no promises have been fulfilled yet is a fool's errand. Haze - Delayed UT3 - Delayed Stranglehold - temporarily delayed (although I suspect it is due out tomorrow) The 360 falls apart if you look at it funny, yet somehow it is the better bet of the two. Go figure.