Wrestlevania

That's not self-referential in an ironic way, it's a hate crime.

More congratulations of an annual variety to all parties born on this day a number of years past. Why don't you start a proper Video game/idea discussion thread then, instead of a naff meta one?

I actually thought Lampkin had drugged his cat for effect and was bullying Lee with the pistol to drive Lampkin's own agenda. He has definite power over Lee, so I thought he was forwarding his own machinations by pressing Lee into office. Turns out the cat really was stiffed, but I still think Lampkin is operating in his own best interests in supporting Lee. I also think the producers should now include pet numbers in the opening credits: "38,765 survivors, 23 dogs, 17 cats, 8 goldfish and an illegally-traded black market capuchin in search of a home... called Earth." As for the other happenings; this whole baby thing seems a bit wishy-washy. While it's quite possible, I still don't get what the point is. They're both 'regular' Cylons, are they not? Or is Tigh (and the other 4) actually a long-term generational hybrid, supplanted amongst humans many years ago (as I theorised earlier in this thread)? No idea, but this facet of the story doesn't serve any obvious purpose at the moment. Here's a potentially-juicy theory doing the rounds at the moment, though: Doc Cottle to be the fifth secret Cylon? It's not my suggestion, but something I came across people debating elsewhere. Personally, I think he's too insignificant to be the fifth; the fifth simply has to be someone far more impactful to my mind. And what with Lee Adama now taking the presidency - plus all the heart-ache and family history concerning his father - my money's on him. That or Rosalyn, now that Adama's committed himself to finding her over commanding Galactica and protecting the fleet. That'd be a real poke in the eye...

10 PRINT "HAPPY RETURNS" 20 GOTO 10 RUN

It was the film's lazy switch from relying on mythology and mysticism that removed the Indie charm for me. What's wonderful about the original films is their exploration of stories that have been around for thousands of years, yet no-one really knows the truth about whether they're real or simply myth. Falling back onto something that happened just a couple of decades back from the viewers' present felt shallow, cheap and rather pointless by comparison. I have no respect for the direction this film took, because it had no apparent respect for the 3 films - and everything they coveted - which came before it. Indiana Jones used to be about demystifying the ancient; Kingdom of the Crystal Skull just felt like a 'by the numbers' cash-in.

Many happy returns, Monsieur Ass.

For Gods' sakes, man, don't give him ideas!

The whole arrangement of Diarrhoea of the Dead was horrible, from the introduction of the premise to the way the narrative built and carried through. If the detestably lazy, cookie cutter character stereotypes were meant to be ironic, self-referential zombie flick in-jokes, they failed miserably. Are we really supposed to believe the patronizingly campy drunkard English art professor is actually a grizzled, arrow slinging Bosnian war veteran? And why is it necessary to have the argumentative jock, the prissy college girl, the nerdy boy and the mysterious semi-goth girl in this day and age? Oh and don't forget the eccentric spoiled rich kid, too, for all you completists out there. You can fuck right off, Mr Romero. And the use of things like YouTube and online video news sites just reeked of bandwagon-jumping, in a vain and wholly misguided effort to somehow force the film into a modern setting. Again, if this was the intention - and I'm certain it was, at least in this particular instance - it's such a flacid, infuriatingly short-sighted effort as to make the film actually more irrelevant. As I said before, hatefully bad schlock--which is actually an insult to 'schlock' anyway.

Having suffered under some rather nasty input lag when originally trying to play the game via a PC emulator, you're not wrong. Fortunately, the PSP implementation seems perfect. But I'm still pretty bad at it.

Just experienced the hammer blow 1-2 of Michelle's betrayal and Manny's truly baleful demise inside 5 minutes... Not that I cared for either of them much at all, but... fuck me... :\ I think the fact the music in this scene from Silence of the Lambs was playing on the car radio, as I drove Manny to 'The Doctor', might have added to the depressing morbidity of the thing.

Wow, excellent news. There's not much that makes me regret not having DS still, but this (and the newly revealed portable Castlevania) is enough to make me feel guilty. And a little related factoid: I've been replaying Rhythm Tengoku, via a GBA emulator, on my PSP a fair bit lately. I'm still embarrassingly bad at it, however...

Erm, I haven't read it yet but I can make out most of the names through familiarity. You crims have been hanging around a good long while on this 'ere Internet, haven't you..? What happened to Sleeping Bag Please anyway, just out of interest? Edit: Aye up, hello sunshine!

I neglected to mention I watched Hannibal (2001) and Diary of the Dead (2008) while I had a stomach bug a couple of weeks ago. I really liked Hannibal for its settings, characters and cinematography, but it's not an important film. Just some seriously good fan service. I'm thinking about getting Hannibal Rising sometime, but I've heard very disappointing things about it. Diary of the Dead, on the other hand, throws up in fans' mouths. Such a ham-fisted, cynical and cheap (in every sense) film I've not seen for a very long time. And I genuinely ended the film hating - and I do mean hating - the thing. Fucking awful.

Brilliant! I've been meaning to steal a police car of my own volition and have a good root through the on-board computer. I'm sure there are all sorts of Easter eggs about other characters buried in there...

Just remembered that I did the same in Vice City Stories, with both the ambulance and the fire engine. (There's a finite number of each mission type in that version, however, but it still helps massively.)

Microsoft tried (and are still trying) to buy Yahoo. But there are other reasons too: Yahoo refuse to launch Delicious v2, even though it's been ready for over a year has a significantly better interface. And, because of this and the above, I switched to Ma.gnolia. I'm only using Foxmarks to sync the 'utility' bookmarks which I physically keep in my browser; stuff like internal links to company systems (time sheet, blog, project environment, etc.). We get upgrades fairly regularly, so it's just one less thing to worry about when new hardware comes in. I tried Google Browser Sync when it first launched and it botched both machines by somehow munging their history, bookmarks and sensitive data together and making an unusable, unstable mess. Knowing Google, however, I'm sure they've ironed out these and many more problems in the intervening year or so. Weave definitely looks like it has potential though, even if it does seem a bit alpha at the moment. All this is cementing my thinking that I'll switch back to Firefox as my main browser now. I've been using it exclusively for development purposes since Safari for Windows became nice and stable. But I'm missing the add-ons and other conveniences from Firefox, even though Safari's font rendering is leagues better than any other browser.

From my point of view (unsurprisingly), definitely not. If you want to take a reductionist view; yes, fine, that's all there is to it. But honestly, I think you need to get out (in-world) more and have some fun. Fuck the 30hr achievement; wander around and just enjoy the massive playground on offer. I spent 10 minutes picking off hobos on the beach with a sniper rifle last night, just to demonstrate to Mrs V how violent you can be in the game. I also spent about half an hour - in vain - trying to jump a motorbike onto the roof of some steps up to the elevated train, just to show how passive and exploratory you can be. And you're definitely meant to get up there somehow. There's a skip with some planks laid directly in front of this particular staircase, forming a definite ramp. It's just bloody hard not to slip off the roof as you land the 'bike, or miss entirely and be crushed to death when the bike lands on top of you. Which raised a laugh anyway when that happened. So go out and have some fun. Try listening to one of the talk radio stations as you walk/drive/ride around aimlessly. Doing this, I discovered Lazlo's back and more embarrassing than ever. My point is that if you're sticking rigidly to the 'main' missions for entertainment, you're missing a lot of what's on offer.

If it meant suckering one or two extra morons, a spammer would attach pictures of his own grandmother. And "james" is hardly incriminating is it?

AAARGH!!! That means I rode right past one (or more) on Sunday night, on my way to execute that blackmailer. That's cool. I was starting to feel no small amount of mounting peer pressure, as most of my friends on- and offline have finished the main story already.

That's fair enough. I just like the added benefit of being able to access all that stuff independently from my main machine too - even on a mobile, if needs must.

Check 'STATS' in the pause menu. You're at exactly the same point I'm up to (freakish!), which is approximately 26% through according to the stats screen. I've not been able to play anything like as much as I wanted to, but I'm enjoying taking my time with it and doing side missions and such. It's just so damned immersive. And I really want to get my money's worth--there's so much to see and do. I've only shot 3 pidgeons so far, but, now I've got the sniper rifle from helping Packie (great little mission, that one), I'm constantly on the look out for flying vermin. Is it true that you can hear them as you drive/walk about, or is my mind playing tricks on me?

Flickr Gmail Ma.gnolia or Foxmarks (I use both) I'm not meaning to sound like a pedantic fuck, but if you change your data habits now it'll work out better if this sort of thing happens again.

Yeah, you could say that... Trying to find and fit together meaningful tracks seems much more troublesome than it ever used to be. Maybe my tastes have diversified too much, or maybe I'm just getting old. I promise I will endeavor to get this sorted out in the next couple of weeks.

Dell's larger form factor widescreen LCDs are exactly the same as Apple's pretentious "Cinemascreen" line of monitors; same screen dimensions, same image engine behind it--everything's identical and from the same fabrication plant. They just don't look anything like as nice, physically; i.e. they're clad in silver and black plastic, not brushed aluminium. We've got several of them at work - the Dell ones I mean - and they're superb. Both times I've taken my Xbox 360 into work and run it off the 24" model in component 720p. (They have an excellent range of standard connections, btw, including HDMI, Component and regular VGA.) And both times I've come away this >< close to returning an hour later, after everyone's gone home, and stealing the effing thing. It looks stunning - with no letter-boxing or HD oversampling (because it's a 16:10 aspect monitor, instead of 16:9) either. GTA4 was gloriously sharp and clear and I wanted to have its babies immediately. If you're after a 22" recommendation, though, my current workstation's Samsung 226BW is chuffing lovely. Eye-wateringly sharp and vibrant image over HDMI, which worked equally as well for gaming as it does for Photoshop and the like. Love the thing, but it only supports single HDMI and single standard VGA inputs unfortunately.

I messed it up first time as well. But I wasn't really paying attention and, er, kind of shot him in the head... Got it right the second time though, knee-capping the fecker. I then shot his co-star in the balls too, after I got fed up with his "big weapon" bragging. He collapsed into a heap, clutching his groin and squealing like a stuck pig. The prick. I also restarted this mission by following Dimitri a little too closely into the porn shop, accidentally shoving him down the stairs and into the opening cut scene. Brilliant! It's extremely satisfying to see even NPCs react with such contextual awareness. Speaking of which, I'm particularly liking the fact the world allows you to develop habits. For example: every time I see one of those lunatic street preachers, I kick them in the shins as a matter of duty. It's an insignificant detail, but there's something quite rewarding in shutting these idiots up, mid-torrent, with a swift boot to the legs. The main characters, though, continue to just amaze, delight and repulse in equal measure. It's all I can do to not remove that cock Manny's knee-caps with a shotgun every time I have to work with the insufferable dickhead, for instance. Brucie continues to be a guilty pleasure; every time I pick him up, I make sure I go on a scooter or overly elaborate motorbike... I think Little Jacob remains my genuine favourite character though. He and Badman are brilliant if you ask me.