Hell Kitty

Blood Money is fab. It was the game I'd hoped the original would be.

I was at Darling Harbour today. Whether was weird. Sunny and then cloudy and then it rainy and then sunny again, all in the space of a few minutes. Stupid weather. I blame video game piracy and the lack of an official statement from Obsidian.

I enjoyed Double Agent. I liked the terrorist compound missions which everyone seems to hate. Probably one of the only times in gaming I've felt like a spy.

Bought a new Seagate 1TB hard drive. My parents are visiting for the week, and Dad brought a Thermaltake power supply he's had for years but never used, and stuck it in my tower to replace the cheap ass one I was using. Turns out it was faulty and it fried both my hard drives, losing all the crap I've accumulated over the years. GREAT.

You seem terribly hung up on peoples use of the word rape. Say you were out alone late one night and out of nowhere a man jumps you, forces you to the ground and, despite your protestations he sodomizes you. Once he is finished with you he flees. You can't identify him, there were no witnesses, and he left no DNA evidence and as such is never found. According to your logic, because there is no one to charge then there was no rape. If I kill someone and no one ever finds out I did it, then legally I guess I am not a murderer, but that doesn't mean a murder didn't take place. And if a guy drugged you and sexed you up? I did not say nor imply that what Polanski did was right or shouldn't be punished. That doesn't answer the question. In every internet discussion on a topic such a this, especially if the adult is a teacher, there is always someone who has to come out with a "if it happened to me I would have loved it!" comment. What is the use of comparing a traumatic experience that didn't happen with a potentially pleasant experience that didn't? If a female friend confessed to you that her teacher forced himself on her would your response be to tell her how awesome it would be for it to happen to you? Do people actually have a point with such comments or are they just making a bad joke?

Hard Drive.

You do the crime, you do the time. He didn't want to do the time so he fled the country. Why should he get away with it? Wow. Some people lie about being raped, so... what? We should assume everyone who makes such an accusation is a liar? Do you have any proof that the events didn't happen as she claims, or is this another one of those cases where you "just know how these things work"? Innocent? He pled guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.

It's from this, says so right there on the youtube page. No idea if the guy was a first year film student at the time.

You're still arguing from the point of view that the movement and combat of the standard FPS is the default at which all games should start at. Which in my mind is a cop-out, because you aren't giving a reason why the control system on it's own is badly designed, only complaining that something you don't like isn't similar to something you do like. As Will points out, RE characters control like tanks. It has always been this way for the series, that's how it has been designed to work. Wanting it to work differently does not make it a problem. Even though the games are incredibly popular, perhaps even more people would play them if the control system worked differently. I would have thought folks on this forum would appreciate developers sticking to their guns rather than changing a game to make it more appealing to the masses. What are they, and how would they work for a game like RE5 without drastically altering what the developer is trying to achieve? That's an odd thing to say. People don't want the control system to feel like a mini-game, and if they don't have a problem with it then it's not going to feel that way to them. If people eat a type of food you think is disgusting, that doesn't mean they enjoy eating disgusting food. "Disgusting" would simply be a label you use to describe how you feel about the food, not an inherent property of it. You seem to be able to accept that there are different strokes for different folks, but fail to recognise that there isn't necessarily anything wrong with the strokes you don't like.

Yeah, I thought it was pretty embarrassing. If ME2 doesn't allow me to continue with my paragon character then I probably won't bother with it.

It'll make COD:MW2 obsolete, apparently.

The controls are only crippled when compared to other, different types of games, and if we assume that the movement and combat of FPS is the default at which all games do (or should) start at. It's like when people complain about turn-based combat being crippled or outdated compared to real-time. Why does my character just stand there and let himself get shot? I don't like the way this works is not the same as bad design.

This is nonsense. It's got nothing to to do with which games do it "right" because there is no "right". A game not allowing the player character to move when shooting has nothing to do with the control system used. Like alanschu mentioned, it's a deliberate game mechanic. You might not like it, which is totally fine, but please don't try to attack it for something it's not, and don't confuse your preference for one way of doing things as proof another is bad or outdated design. This is true. It's fairly typical for horror games to feature a player character far weaker or more vulnerable than shooters that allow the player to absorb a huge amount of damage. This is also true military shooters and sims where one shot kills are more common. Wanting these types of games to use the same mechanics as other types of games is missing the point.

When I got up at 5:30 this morning to a blood red sky I thought I was either dreaming or hallucinating. It was pretty disappointing to find out it was just a dust storm and not the first sign of the zombie apocalypse. More funky pics here. Sitting on the train looking at an empty Hornsby platform at about 9:30 this morning gave me quite the Fallout 3 vibe with everything being a yellow/brown tinge.

It hasn't been very good for a while now. I suppose if people have kept watching after the first season there's no reason to think they'll stop now.

I've only used D2D once* when I bought Dreamfall. It needed to be activated but doesn't have to run through a separate program like Steam. I don't have any complaints. *That's because everything else I would have bought from them wasn't available outside North America.

Men are cyborgs.

I probably had the most fun when using stealth. It's always satisfying getting in and out killing only the target It's pretty rough around the edges*, but I suppose if you get find it for a cheap price there's no harm in trying it out. *The other parts are also pretty rough.

I did exactly the same thing. Did you ever play Boiling Point? It was like the opposite of FC2. The huge jungle environment was pretty boring thanks to having only a few elements copy/pasted a million times, but having different factions made things interesting. You'd have to slow down so they could identify you, and you could help them when rival factions attacked. I was expecting the same sort of thing from FC2.

No way. People will whine about the same old things whether or not games are art. The "art" label isn't going to get rid of the sense of entitlement folks have. I'm not sure how what you said is a response to what I said. Why would the "art" label lead to people having a greater tolerance or support for experimentation when they're currently so intolerant when it comes to change?

Respawning didn't bother me too much, but it was rather annoying when I realised I was going down the wrong road and turned around only to find the checkpoint I destroyed less than a minute ago was back. I had a much bigger problem with the fact that the world just didn't seem very alive.

That's a strange question, does anyone think that? No way. People will whine about the same old things whether or not games are art. The "art" label isn't going to get rid of the sense of entitlement folks have.

Assume that in the near future games are recognised as art. I don't mean individual parts of a game being seen as having some sort of artistic value (like individual chess pieces), but a game as a whole. What does that mean? What would that change? What purpose does being labeled "art" serve?

BG3.