Blarghagh

Iron? I thought he said gold. Oh, I do. Believe me, I do.

Marvel's falling more and more into their formula.

Oby, I respect your ability to find pretty women but do they all have to be terrible pictures of pretty women? They don't do them justice.Half of them have more lens flare than woman. This ain't Star Trek.

I don't know.

Guns of Icarus Online is a lot more difficult than I thought it would be.

I agree with this 100%. I want to have something with the feeling of the Infinity Engine games, not the exact mechanics. Especially not the exact mechanics.

He's spot on in this case. Michael J. Fox is awesome.

Hah! I remember those. I was so disappointed when it turned out to be a generic build a medieval town simulator.

Source: (NSFW) This photographer's gallery.

No ****. I am incredulous. /sarcasm This is my favourite post ever. It's just so bad. It made me go "what, did I miss a fact check?" and then I opened the spoiler and realized it required me to know the poster's opinion on gaming webcomics for the sarcasm to work and the poster actually thought I did! If there was a message board equivelant of "funniest home videos" submissions where someone rides a bike into a wall on purpose and pretends it was a funny accident, this would be it. Thank you for that! I'm not even being sarcastic, I had to laugh out loud.

A man realized his house was being robbed and he called the police. "Sorry, there are currently no cars available," they told him. "If you guys can't show up I'm going to take matters into my own hands and kill the robber," the man said, exasperated. Within minutes, three cars full of officers arrived at the scene and caught the robber, alive and well. They talk to the owner. "I thought you said you were going to kill him!" the officer exclaims. "I thought you said there were no cars available," the man replied. (I voted for all to skew the results.)

I Have a question for you guys but there will be prologue I've dabbled in 3D modelling since I got Imagine 2.0 for the Amiga on a coverdisk when I was a kid, lately I've tried Modo and found it to be as comfortable as a pair of old shoes (including the bugs and holes...on Windows at least) but whenever I try one of the big industry standard packages I feel like I'm eating glass. More than likely I'll never be a professional 3D modeller but if I wanted to try, which program should I specialise in? Here's the breakdown: Autodesk programs require a license, so unless you can download a student version (or you are an unscrupulous pirate) they may not be for you. Max is mostly used within the Game industry for production, is a little hard to get into but once you know the program it becomes a powerful tool for modeling. Just know there is a bit of a learning curve and depending how hard you go at it you will get good results. I'm particularly fond of it for hard surface modelling since you can do pinpoint precision work, although 3ds Max Design is built specifically for that kind of thing (mostly for architecture and industrial design) Maya is favored by animation and the more "artistic" of 3d modellers who are not that squeamish about topology. It's good points are that its easy to code for (which is a blessing since Maya without plugins is horrible, IMCO) and the Mental Ray renderer works like a charm with it. It has an assortment of powerful tools for animation (AutoCad) so if that's your thing go for it. Mudbox was made by ex members from Pixologic (the guys that made Zbrush) its a digital sculpting and texturing program. I use it mostly because of its texturing capabilities, it doesn't do uv mapping but its strength lies in the use of projection and stencils to apply HD textures without having to make them seamless. Zbrush its the ****, the bee's knees, I will marry this program and bear its children. This is the air you must breathe if you want to be a creature/character modeller, it does everything but walk and water (plus its not so good for hard surface modelling) Its the most powerful digital sculpting program on the market. Its a program for artists, so if you know how to sculpt in RL you will have an easy transition. But if you learn how to sculpt in Zbrush you will loathe RL sculpting, I do. Blender is like the bastard child of Max and Mudbox or a Frankenstein like creature made of parts from other programs that doesn't exactly do anything remarkably well. On the flipside, its free and thanks to it handling Nif. files there is a lot of help online due to the Bethesda modding communities. Sculptris is Zbrush-lite, its made by the same guys and offered free. Sort of like a welcome package for the artist/sculptor who wants to get into digital art. If you planning to use any of the digital sculpting programs you may also want to get yourself a digital pen and tablet, there are probably some used ones reasonably priced right now. My recommendation would be a Wacom Bamboo since you're a hobbyist but you really can't go wrong with Wacom. Aside from that if you need any help deciding you can PM me, glad to hear that you're interested in getting into 3d modeling I concur. If it's really modeling and texturing you want, I recommend ZBrush which is truly a joy to work with once you find out where the buttons are. It requires almost no technical knowledge to make a badass sculpt. For organic things ZBrush is essentially the end-all these days. The downside of ZBrush is that you can't do a lot of the other things you can do in programs like Max and Maya, such as animation. For all around 3D packages, I'd recommend Maya or Max. Both are expensive, however. Personally, I prefer Max even though it has a slightly higher learning curve - Maya works almost entirely on certain key combinations to find the functions you want to use whereas in Max everything is in structured menus. I just prefer it that way, but honestly both programs can do practically the same thing unless you get really into the technical parts. If you're looking for something cheap and versatile, I do suggest Blender, though. It's improved a lot in the latest versions and it has a lot of things built in - sculpting, an editing suite, even a game engine. If you're willing to deal with the crashing, it's worth your time. Eventually, what you learn in Blender will transfer pretty well to other packages and all 3D programs can crash. Blender just does it more.

Woola (the dog thing) was my favourite thing in the book as well.

A combination of Max and ZBrush actually. Different programs work together like a klansman and a black panther member.

It's an old game, even the most hardcore players are going to be tired of it at this point. I don't see what the fuss is. I find the Vivendi business a lot more interesting.

You say vocal minority, I place emphasis on vocal minority. The very term means that the others are not vocal in comparison - maybe you should question your own understanding of the term instead of mine. The minority is the loudest, and that's why the articles are about them, and that's why they act as ambassador for gamers. Regular gamers speak up all the time? I call bull**** on that claim. Just in this thread alone, how many people just told everyone to ignore it?

Sometimes I regret working with CG applications. Half the time it just doesn't work.

Sounds like you're the vocal minority.

Yes, because the vocal minority acts as ambassador. If the regular gamer would speak up, that would not happen.

QA is pretty infamous for firing people for no reason. I guess the other guy got fired for starting a fight, I don't know what the "vague" given reasons were for the other guy.

I have to disagree there. The gatekeepers have a part, but I blame the consumers for the most part. The gatekeepers make decisions based on what the audience says, not with their mouths, but with their wallets. They will keep making sequels because that's what the consumer will pay for.

Where was the risk in the billion dollar earning Pirates of the Carribean 4? Not disagreeing, but just getting to the root of the problem - the sequels make the big cash* and the original or new properties are expected to do the same. Budgets and expectations for big blockbusters rise, the original properties have to follow along to be able to compete yet they stand no chance at making the same amount of money. Due to this "budget inflation" by franchises everything other than a sequel becomes a giant risk. *See Pacific Rim losing to both Despicable Me 2 and Growns Ups 2.

Do you happen to know "The Trenches"? It's a webcomic about a QA team, but that's not really the most entertaining thing on the website - the best part is "Tales from the Trenches" where QA people send in their stories anonymously. Some of them are heartbreaking and others are hilarious. Can be found here. This is my personal favourite: It's a feature. A sexy, sexy feature. "Gauntlets can be thrown in lots of ways, but the intent of insult is always there. I was testing a part of a game where the user had to interact with a computer terminal to type in various commands. I was told to try variations on known phrases, but alter it slightly for each iteration (capital letters, spaces, etc). “Try everything you can think of.” After several hours of this and nearing total mental collapse, I started putting in various nonsense phrases for fun (similar to you’d do with old text parser games), just to see if the programmers had planned for that sort of juvenile behavior. Besides, I thought I could always argue that this should have been thought and tested. I typed in “[insert insult for promiscuous female here]” and suddenly a slideshow appeared with naked women. After the shock, I noticed it was actually all the same woman, but in the requisite fantasy poses this sort of thing affords. A few seconds into this revelry, my supervisor walked by and asked me just what the world I thought I was doing, son. I explained what happened. He stares for a few seconds and then walks off, telling me to stay there until he returned and Don’t. Touch. Anything. 20 minutes pass, during which I’m equally terrified and embarrassed, as people were walking by my desk and giggling uncontrollably. One guy did offer me a high five. Also the pictures looped, and I lost interest after the first eighteen cycles. Sort of. Supervisor returns with another guy I’ve never seen before, and tells him to look at my screen. This second guy runs through the full spectrum of emotions - giddy surprise which begets alarmed realization - before his eyes redden in fury and he runs down the hall. Seconds later, he emerges in a fist fight with another man. Turns out a programmer had been having an affair with an artist’s wife, and I’d brought it to the climactic breaking point upon stumbling across this “feature.” Their struggle ended quickly once security was called in. Both were fired immediately. I was terminated the next day for vague reasons at best. I did try it once the game released, and (of course) was disappointed." EDIT: Hrm, the slur in it got censored. Edit'd for understandability.