James

Something like it, yeah, depending on how you choose to play it. Dan already has Death Aboard (he was one of the guys I was trying to play with). It may have been him who was having trouble getting into the game, though, so I think we'll try it out before Sunday at some point. And I'll point him to the other ones, too.

In my experience, which hasn't included actually playing any of these online, when you try to join a server playing a map you don't have, it brings up a box with a button that just sends you to a website where you can download it manually. Doing so beforehand would streamline the process, I'd say. I downloaded this ages ago, but had difficulty getting all the players into a game, so we eventually gave up (a little ominous for our efforts, perhaps). Last night I decided to do a quick run-through single-player on Normal. It was pretty good. As Scratch notes, it can be a little confusing in places, with a more open and less directed design, it's easy to find yourself passing through the same area numerous times. On the other hand, it's quite interesting to play a campaign with a distinct design style, and it has a lot of options for alternative paths and so on. Also, the finale is quite unusual, with the radio quite some distance from the extraction point. I held out near there, partly because there are supplies there, but I can also imagine a team gradually fighting their way to the exit being pretty exciting. I guess moving around in finales is often a bad idea, but it'd be worth a try.

a) Hahahahaha, no, I completely appreciate the necessity of that stuff. If you stopped doing that would I be expected to stop parking next to fire trucks when they tip over and spraying the driver when they get out? I do get kind of annoyed when people blow my ice cream truck up, but I'd do the same, so it's all part of the fun. I was actually very fond of that misspelling of my name a couple of years ago. COINCIDENCE? c) I made semi-serious attempts to win some of the races. It's kind of boring. I don't think it will catch on.

I think I saw them support Mogwai at the ICA a few years ago. They played for quite a while. The venue management people wanted them to leave. The band did not want to leave. The management people shone torches in the band's eyes. The band made aggressive gestures with their fingers.

I bought and started it not long after Giant Bomb posted their review, based largely on what I judged to be some very cool screenshots. That's utterly daft, I know, but it looked like it was doing some interesting things, visually. I've only played one or two sessions, but that's more because of all the other things there are to be playing than any fault with Cryostasis. I want to return to it sometime.

THESE ARE THE NEWS.

Fucking shoes. I swear they used to last me years and years, and now they develop massive great water-sucking holes within a few months of use. I don't know what it is that I do to them. It must be all the strenuous walking to and from train stations. I hate buying shoes. So yeah, 360s. Good luck to you, Patters.

Yeah, someone should gather a load of helicopters and take PAX on a tour of the world or something. Or just Thumbses.

How much of a difference does that make? I have an ATI card, so turning it on slowed things to an absolute crawl. It looked pretty good anyway, but I'm wondering what I'm missing out on. I guess the main thing would be his cape. I think I can probably live with sub-optimal physics modelling. Still, it did make me question my choice of card.

Yeah, the series as a whole seems to hop back and forth between making a point and just being a bit surreal, but I'm very fond of it.

I have no icons on my desktop. I used to limit myself to one column for tidiness' sake, but I then realized that I spend almost all my time at a computer with at least one program maximized, and I accessed everything from the start menu. I used to have browser and "show desktop" links in the quick launch bar, but I realized that I could just have the browser at the top of the start menu and never ever use the desktop and therefore free up a bit of space on the taskbar. Now my wallpapers look nice and unsullied in the three or four seconds before I cover them up completely with something else. But yeah, I can't stand cluttered desktops. The very idea of having the desktop as the default download location is repugnant to me.

Good suggestion, but I'm fond of the idea of him setting up some sort of online emporium. Also, it looks like there are required second-level domains.

Not , then. a) The title reminds me of . I saw a documentary about the guy who wanted to teach soldiers to walk through walls.

I was recently reminded of my disappointment that thewiz.biz is taken.

Not just lacking in depth, but breadth too!

Jesus Christ, that's hilariously obnoxious. I love how it enthusiastically pisses all over the sombre and thoughtful image I had of Link. Fuck all that sissy crap, we're giving this dude a comic catchphrase!

A whopping four units at a time! What, no crazy loop-de-loops and hanging from platforms by your front wheel alone, desperately trying to avoid bashing your head on the bottom of it? Consider me de-interested. Unterested. OK, thanks. Toblix's above quote suggests the two are not as similar as I'd thought. I'm feeling a weird sort of camaraderie with you guys. This is like when I first realized that a lot of the games I played in my childhood were actually quite popular and other people played them too. At the time I don't think I was really aware of how popular things were, other than the really big names like Sonic and Mario and Doom. Other people played that game! Awesome!

I don't think the point is that nothing changes; I think it's a matter of the more fundamental architecture change that something like quantum or biological computing would presumably require (or perhaps not). Of course there are developments in how things work, but I would have thought that biological and quantum computers would work in an entirely different way and have a completely different set of hardware and interfaces and standards and so on. Then again, I guess I have no real reason to think that. Perhaps it just affects the internal workings of the processor or something. Clearly I'm no expert on this stuff. I just assume that it'll be something where you have to kind of take the plunge and ditch all your old hardware and maybe software. Thinking about it, it'll probably be more mundane. People were suggesting a similar kind of watershed with 64-bit processors, and it turns out that there's plenty of backwards-compatability and inter-operability and the transition to actual fully 64-bit computing is taking ages. At least, that's how I understand it. Again, I'm very clearly not an expert. Or perhaps, if they do offer such spectacularly better performance, our existing infrastructure would be a horrendous bottleneck. STILL, the reason for even mentioning any of that was that the comparison between the advances in technology over the past ten years and the prospect of shifting to either of those prospective technologies in the next ten years doesn't seem perfectly matched. Am I right in thinking that the essential components of processors have been largely the same throughout the whole of personal computing's history, albeit getting orders of magnitude smaller with time? And that the essential components of quantum computing or bio computing would be quite fundamentally different? I guess it all might just plug into a variation of an ATX board, but it's still something they're having to develop from scratch, isn't it? OH I DON'T KNOW. Also, and in more general terms, I think people have a tendency to get carried away with their visions of the future. It's amazing to think how far things have come in just a few short years, but in another sense things are still pretty much the same as they ever were. The year 2000 has been and gone and we're not living on the moon, but we are doing incredible things that we never would have guessed a few decades ago. I get very hesitant when people say "oh yeah, we'll have quantum computing in ten years, and we'll all have cybernetic implants by 2020" and so on. I can live with projecting estimates from existing trends, but when it involves something new emerging it seems to rely on too many variables to be accurately predictable. But, to be fair, DanJW did say "at least", so all these words are pretty much pointless. So, that Rage, eh?

Yeah, that's pretty much my thinking. I guess the components are being updated one by one, but I'm interested to see how such a revolutionary change will take place. It's one of those things that will obviously have to happen at some point, but I can't actually imagine that point.

I thought the idea was to post angry and hateful comments on articles and YouTube videos. Of course, that's what you should be doing at all other times, too.

Well it certainly played a role in my buying it. Not that I didn't have buyer-confidence beforehand, but, you know, convenience and visibility and stuff. I saw Nachimir had bought them and thought "oh yeah, those games, I wonder how much they cost", and I saw how much they cost, and went "oh, well that makes it an easy decision". Or similar.

I see you have GTA4.

Yeah, that would be very cool, and I do have a compulsion to record things (I used to record the conversations my friends and I had at the pub), but I'm not sure I can really justify spending any real money on it, especially since I hardly ever do anything with any of this junk. I just like the idea of preserving things. It's like how I'd like to own a load of music and audio hardware, but all I'd do is twiddle around with it for my own amusement, so I'd be basically spending hundreds of pounds on a toy. Wait...

I WANTED TO MOVE ON WITH MY LIFE YOU BASTARD

Don't make me start up a new round.