gdf

Anyone else who hates Boris?

I would have bought this, but I grudge spending more than £10 on a physics playset. Oh wait, already I spent £25 on Crysis.

http://falloutmods.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_3_Mods I use there, and the front page has links to the best sources for stuff. What don't you like about the inventory screen? I find it much less annoying than Oblivion's default one was (not as good as the modded one).

Oh well, agree to disagree. As I said, I got so sick of the same green sluge that I needed to change it

I agree with you, we can both be cunts together.

Doing that doesn't help anyone, because for every game pirated the publisher sees it as another sale lost, meaning they are more likely to place prohibitive measures of DRM in games. I wonder what percentage of pirated copies are just for people to "demo". Hint: It's probably significant enough that we all suffer for it. However, arguably developers should all be putting the maximum effort into their games, and if most games were worth buying people would be less likely to do that. Bottom line though, I wholly disagree with piracy.

There is one puzzle where you use a card on the shed door to get the clippers that requires pixel hunting, but other than that it's great. Remember to save when you reach the train tunnel towards te end of the game, I hadn't for an hour and luckily made a save the screen before almost certain death.

I suppose I'm drawing from the fairly narrow scenario of a single mother who has a fairly budget but has to feed a few kids. In that case, I don't think that the animals' situation comes into it. However, if we raised the top tier of tax to 55 or 60%, increased welfare to those in that situation and encouraged farmers to produce free-range meat (not as keen on subsidising as healthcare, welfare and education should be the three main areas of government spending, but I'm not sure how else to "incentivise" them, perhaps the animal rights lobby could raise a bit of cash and gift it to the state for that purpose) then we could see a sharp fall in the price of quality meat and a huge increase in availability along with a marked improvement to care of "eatin' animals". [by the way, why are so many users from Brighton? Hope I'm not being rude, but I'm interested to find out right now.]

Thanks for reminding me about Zone mode. I went and played some and it seems I'm now able to string together enough good corners to actually finish a race now

Sounds like fun, I haven't bothered to start driving yet, but when I do I'll definitely play Burnout or Ridge Racer beforehand More anecdotes: When I played Shenmue for the first time I began mixing up in game time and real time. Almost went to my bed at noon. When I was about eight or nine I became totally obsessed by Ocarina of Time, by the time I got to Ganon's Castle it was all I could think about and I spent literally hours of school time that could have been spent doing work daydreaming about it. A similar thing happened with Banjo-Kazooie, I even did a piece of creative writing that employed fairly liberal use of "inspiration", i.e. nicking the whole world and characters. Also, one time I played Puzzle Fighter so much and for such extended periods of time that I nearly went totally mental from the music playing in my head. After a few days I felt like drop kicking (drop-kick, dropkick?) a child in the forehead to ease the frustration. Those aren't as thrilling as some, but it happens to all of us to some degree I'm sure.

Nachmir, Mega tangent, but returning to the apostrophe: I was aware of the "Fraser, his pancake" use, and I tried to explain to my English teacher last year that the apostrophe does only have the single purpose of replacing letters that would otherwise be omitted through speech. The confusion over its supposed plurality doesn't need to be there, but I suppose since it is an onerous task for many to grasp the most basic functions of the punctuation mark that to be taught such an in depth background to a single character of written language would be inherently prohibitive to many. In this case, I agree that there could be an "Apostrophe Mark. II", but my main fear is that this would simply cause even more confusion. Imagine if it were two apostrophes in a row, then you'd have people writing: "Bananas sold here", "Banana's sold here", "Banana''s sold here", "Bananas' sold here" and "Bananas'' sold here". There does seem to be massive hesitation on the part of a fairly sizable chunk of people to sort out their use of the mark, so either way you swing it there will be increased bemusement. Keeping it as it is and attempting to drum it into the heads of successive generations may be the only way to overcome the problem. [brkl, I would say that 95% of all art is nothing more than decent, but not crap, and thinking about it, of the remaining 20% of poetry, probably only about a third is of any merit whatsoever. Pah, I just don't like it, leave it there ]

I remember reading a letter in a magazine from a guy that played too much GTA. He and a friend came out of a pub, but their lift was nowhere to be seen, so he just said "Hold on a sec, I'll just steal a car and we can-" I went through the same thing with those challenge rooms, I sat and played them until 3 AM one night and it was all I thought about the next day.

The way a lot of cheap meat is produced is pretty horrendous, but the Supermarkets hawk it at a much lower price than other stuff just because it's pumped out in such a huge quantity. Sadly, a lot of people really can't afford that extra few pounds to buy the meat of animals that were treated well. I try my best of course, but it's certainly true that laws have to become a lot less lax regarding the treatment of animals being bred for their meat.

I saw Paxman discussing the apostrophe with some professor of language. They both seemed to agree that it was pointless, but I get totally confused if they aren't there when I read something. I hate having to keep correcting my teachers for their misuse of them. And I believe that roughly 80% of poetry is pretentious nonsense that no thought was put into. When you feel the need to write a comma in the title of your piece, you know you're an arse. "I'm so edgy because I write with erratic spacing and sentence structure".

Damn right, it managed to distract me from all of the shiny new games and captivated me enough to finish it in a day. Excellent game, stands up really well. It's free on (the great) GOG.com; it installs SCUMMVM and everything for you, which is very useful because none of my adventure games seem to load properly when I try with the emu.

If I get a free day then I may just blast through it like I did with BASS last month.

That's incredibly awesome. I wish I could punch a shark. On a totally unrelated matter (because I can't make threads yet) has nobody else noticed that the flag at the top of Idle Banter looks a lot like the Israeli national colours? Is this not quite disturbing when put in the context of a ruined landscape, as if it's being claimed, especially with the current situation? [Not going to get into the issue itself, I'd just end up raging about kill/death ratios etc.]

Is it worth playing through Full Throttle or am I better off just watching this? I mean, I've got so much to play right now, and although I love Tim FREAKIN' Schafer, I can't summon the energy to faff around in SCUMMVM again. Meh, video games. [RPS is a great site by the way, a goldmine of links to indie gems that have been swallowed up by big names]

I've always just used "Video game", so nobody's going to stop me doing so any time soon.

I just got this the other day and I really like it, but I'm still not any good at it. The last Wipeout I played was Pure on PSP, and after dozens of hours of perfecting technique I finally got the hang of it and started owning in the TTs. That was two years ago, looks like I've lost it again

Pretty sure it was Marek. Go ahead, ignore me.

The one that clicks the mouse when you put the cursor over "Burn DVD".

Boris is watching. Boris knows that you visit pornographic sites. Boris knows that you've looked in the "Shemales" category more than once. Boris is watching.

I don't think the article in question was particularly taking a stance against gamers. You'll want to look at the Daily Mail for that. It was a badly researched article, but how many times do online gaming sites take rumours and run with them (I find Kotaku useful, but they're one of the worst)? Also, I failed to see the big fuss about WoW when I played it. Then again, I was doing it basically on my own, so maybe a key part of the enjoyment was absent. In the words of Jackie Chan's Uncle from that awful animated series which aired on Fox Kids: "One more thing!" Darkfall is a very exciting looking upcoming MMO. It will probably trounce WoW in many ways, but obviously can never hope to reach the same userbase.

I think tailing the guy in chapter three was my favourite part of the game. It reminded me of dressing up as a scientist and knocking people out with those special cigars in MGS3