Raff

I hate it so much. I once queued with literally 40 people, many accompanied by their parents as guarantors, to see a one room studio dump in Paris, a week after starting a job and 3 weeks into flat searching while living in a hostel. Eventually I got a pretty good flatshare with two girls. I was their second choice, the smooth talking first choice had been kicked out after two nights for helping himself to baguettes (obviously) and other people's computers.

It was alright. I didn't like the creepy ultra middle class family bit. Let's all wank ourselves to death about social media and phones. It was like the makers of Microsoft lifestyle adverts were given their own segment.

Give me that kazoo... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aMM_djvcu0

I'll try and join if ping's OK. I have a new nvidia card after years of ATI stutter ruining all source games.

You're thinking of Tactical Intervention. This is Blacklight: Retribution, free to play sequel to bad game Blacklight: Tango Down, from the makers of the despicable Blackwater video game.

It's not worth the download. Really quite astonishingly bad for a 'beta'.

I have 20 leftover breeze blocks behind my shed. Free to collect.

My 'inner goddess' declares this a Day One Perch.

Personally I think it's a pretty big shame that carefully designed typography is washed away by reflowable text and incredibly limited formatting, but font settings are nice to have. On top of that though, cheap ebook conversion practices have a nasty habit of unnecessarily missing out oddities like illustrated pre-title pages even if they're very deliberately designed. Books with lots of footnotes are horrible because they can't be footnotes anymore, you have to follow links back and forth. This kind of stuff wasn't thought through and now the leading format is a millstone round the neck. When you're making an ebook, doing the Kindle version is like making your website compatible with netscape navigator. It's such a shame because they're the best devices in a lot of ways, if they would just support EPUB, things would be so much better for everyone.

In the EU, ebooks are subject to VAT whereas books are not. Everyone seems to agree that this is ludicrous and outdated, but it's taking forever to get it changed. France and Luxembourg have already reduced their ebook VAT, but the European Commission is grumbling about this because they're only supposed to do something like that along with everyone else. Incidentally, Amazon UK sells all its ebooks from Luxembourg at 3% VAT. Ebook pricing will improve, but unfortunately people seem perfectly happy with shitty typography, proprietary formats and DRM.

I have a degree in 'Publishing' (these exist) and will hopefully soon have a job in the industry (but more likely in academic rather than trade). While I agree that books are expensive, and your example is a rip off, I'd like to add a few things: Aside from huge bestsellers and various fringe cases, margins on new trade books are generally pretty low for the publisher and for most retailers depending on how they operate. This is why WHSmith molest you with chocolate oranges at the till. Books are substantially cheaper in the UK than in a lot of other European countries which still have fixed prices (we got rid of the net book agreement in the 90s). They get annoyed when we complain. Obvious, but very important: Amazon makes other places look expensive because they have the market share to demand massive discounts. If almost any other shop charged the same prices, they would be making a loss on every sale. It's a vicious cycle which only a few small publishers resist. Even if you refuse to supply your book to amazon, they still put up an 'out of stock' listing for your book which leads people to buy a used copy or to give up/forget. This is why libraries exist, use them before they close them! I wince and cry whenever I go into Blackwells and look at the beautiful new hardback history books for £60+. Then I go and download a dumb video game (which I can't resell or lend) for £30. Sadly it's becoming more and more likely that physical books will become an expensive luxury sooner than many people think, and it will happen long before ebooks stop being shit.

The olympic torch's visit to my town was the kind of crass, moronic commercialism I never previously would have thought possible in this country.

I worked for an incompetent loss-making french software company for a year and in my mind the Ubisoft headquarters is identical. I'm imagining the tone-deaf strategy meetings and clueless managers with no real understanding of the what their company produces presenting their responses to last year's vacuous industry fads. Cavalier attitude to any criticism or doubt expressed by customers. Quite good cantine food.

I actually played AoC for more than a year and a half with a hilarious mostly romanian/serbian guild. We had a lot of fun. I found the common L50 quest gap complaint only really applied if you were playing the game as an endless stream of quests; you didn't have to do much mucking about or help many people through tough spots to never notice it. The purpose of AoC's overblown tutorial section was to sell the game to people who don't and won't ever like MMOs in the hope that they will forget to cancel their sub a month or two after quitting because the voice acting stopped. A popular MMO tactic.

You'd think. They're currently completely rebooting the new player experience for Anarchy Online for the third time, to launch with the engine overhaul they trailered 4 years ago which is somehow still in development. #Funcom

You can alternatively just blow up a locked door if you find the C4, I assume.

It was effectively axed in the UK some years ago. In 2009 I was quite surprised to learn that Southpark was still being made, having not heard of it since about 1999 when I was still in primary school and it was on terrestrial TV late at night.

This is a great surprise, never heard of it until just recently. It has a nice tone, the swedish angle is nice and fresh, the RTS squad control and various features that would have been misguidedly cut in most projects, keep it from feeling like another diablo clone. The hotbar is bugged, I can't reorder my powers properly, but not run into anything else.

+ Doshin the Giant, Cubivore, Animal Crossing It's also important to remember that very early in its life Gamecube stuff became hard to find in shops outside big cities, and was very rarely marked down.

Gaystation. Nintendo sixty-poor.

I still find Windows 7 positively luxurious, especially since I have to use XP at work.

Becasue it worked so well with Shadowrun!

He chose the right part of the game at least, coming up into the clocktower with that music is one of the purest moments of any game.

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