Wrestlevania

Armadillo Run?

Very excited about Fez myself. Great write-up, Marek, and I also like the reskinning of your blog too. (Though I do miss that Space Invader mosaic too.)

Mrs V and I are up to the last episode of Dexter, season 2. Started off pretty lame, owing to what I expect was a rather large spike in audience figures off the back of the first season. But once the patronising crap was out the way (episode 4 onwards) it really started to pick up. One thing I've noticed; there's not a single character either of us don't find interesting on more than a superficial level. It's a very carefully crafted series. Oh and I tried to watch Family Guy's Blue Harvest at the weekend, but was bored rigid about 15 minutes in. Just... what's the point? I could write predictable zeitgeisty crap like that -- really have gone off that series lately.

Belated happy returns, Nick.

I now have very little interest in reading this discussion at all. Edit: A newly-hired colleague at my work place used to be a developer for Codemasters, and Gavin Raeburn [see article] was his old boss. Interestingly, my new colleague pointed out that 'Gavin Raeburn' is an anagram of 'vagina burner'... (May read this article after all.)

I pity the fool who goes anywhere else for his Pokémon friend codes.

Hang in there; Area 5 is sublime.

The character-generation process has already made me lolz:

But it is dead; Toshiba have officially killed the HD-DVD format with immediate effect and has ceased production of hardware and media. Another interesting Sony-funded tidbit: it's rumoured that Toshiba agreed to bow out of the format war quickly and quietly, after the Time-Warner switch, on the premise that Sony purchased one of Toshiba's PS3-essential chip fabs. Which Sony duly did. So Sony may have won, ultimately, but, what with the format wranglings and the huge losses they've incurred over PS3, they've paid for it in blood. It'll be interesting to see which form of HD consumption catalyses with consumers first -- Blu-ray or downloads. I'm hedging my money on a fairly even split in about 18 months' time, with both still being completely dwarfed by healthy DVD sales.

Because a codec doesn't care how it's delivered, just that you have sufficient rights to consume the media. And sufficiently enabled hardware in order to consume it, most critically. Getting the media companies to subscribe to production in your codec is a habit-forming thing. And film distributors are so massive that they likely wouldn't change once they'd switched over to HD encoding with a certain codec. Microsoft used HD-DVD and Toshiba for it's own - much wider - agenda, not to further the HD-DVD format in and of itself. Just as a side note: did you hear that Sony is rumoured to have dropped $400,000,000 (four hundred million US) in order to persuade Time-Warner to switch formats?

No, admittedly it is too soon to say it's a failure. But in terms of dragging attention away from DVD to hi-def I think it's very, very low on your average consumer's priorities.

I r0x0r!

Emulation stretches to: Super NES MegaDrive Neo-Geo PS1 ISOs PSP ISOs --amongst a truck-load of other aspects which I've not really looked into.

Dungeon Runners is the best free MMO.

Personally, I'm subscribing to the idea that Microsoft backed HD-DVD to fuck about with Sony. Not because they care about codecs, but because they want people to download their HD media directly from MS instead of buying it on a physical medium (irrespective of the format). Let's call it The iTunes Strategy, only I think it's failed. But then I think HD outside of gaming is a commercial failure; consumers aren't ready for it and your average Joe couldn't care less either -- they're perfectly happy with their extensive (and dirt cheap) DVDs, thanks.

Phun is a very interesting-looking 2D physics sandbox application, of which you can download the 3rd beta for free. I would have a fiddle this lunch time, but Mrs V. and the spawn are meeting me for a burger.

Case rests, m'lud.

The end boss was a particularly low point in Gears for me and the epitome of why I think this game is lazy and cheap in its design. After repeatedly throwing myself against the rocks for about an hour I gave up in disgust. Couldn't be more indifferent to the announcement of the sequel; and I bet you it's just a technology tweak and some different levels. November 2008 indeed.

Mmm, I'd say you're completely missing the point too.

Tsk, tsk -- bad 5k!LLz.

But who'd get the steak -- you or Ginger?

Very much doubt it, as you wouldn't be bringing up anything that had made you feel bad. You'd just be made to chuck your guts up spontaneously, having not felt ill for a period of time beforehand. :tdown:

Not a word of a lie; that thing genuinely terrifies me.

Gentlemen, I salute you -- that's some truly splendid highscoring.