Humodour

iPod. If you don't want an iPod for some reason (don't say iTunes - there's plenty of third party music managers), then stick with Creative - they really know their ****. The Zunes are just crap.

Thirded. Make normal as pissy as you want, but give me a challenge on hard.

You haven't even played AP yet and despite the information that has been released, there's a huge amount that hasn't, so how on earth can you say that? Or are you asking for Obsidian to design a really unique, revolutionary new game like they were with Aliens before it was put on hold? Obsidian isn't going to do that for every single game. Even so I fundamentally disagree with your assertion that what we've been told about AP so far makes it any way generic, a re-hash, or unoriginal, besides the fact that they're not reinventing the wheel repeatedly. No they didn't. Take off your rose-coloured lenses for a second. Many of the best games were actually the best because they did one thing really well and/or integrated all their parts together better than any game before. I think you're struggling with another issue here, as well - you're seeking innovation for innovation's sake rather than for the sake of fun and entertainment. There comes a point in a technology or medium's development when new research or techniques becomes harder and harder. Just like it's hard to make a best selling game these days without millions of dollars and large group of people working on the game, it's also hard to come up with new ideas and features in games these days that haven't already been done before. Just like any maths proof I come up with these days is likely to have been already proved before (because we're building on history instead of repeating it), any new game out today isn't liable to include many innovative new features (and any game that does is liable to suck for trying too hard to push boundaries for the sake of pushing boundaries). 15 years ago I could take an FPS and go "wow, wouldn't this be grand if a few key characters had dialogue?". 10 years ago it was "wow, wouldn't this be grand if every character had dialogue, and a few key characters had multiple dialogue options characters?". 5 years ago it's "wow, wouldn't this be grand if every character you spoke to had multiple dialogue options and many of them meaningful?" Where do you go from there? It's not an easy question to answer. The same pattern has been evolving in every other area of computer gaming. So if every area of gaming has evolved since the days of yore, to the point it now takes a lot of thinking and eureka moments in the shower to come up with something truly innovative for just one feature, where do you go from there? My answer would be that you only innovate where it makes sense to. If you can make a perfectly awesome game by just incorporating all the awesome features of past games without adding a single new feature of your own, I say do so - you'll still end up with one of the best games of all time.

Also funny (what with the Iranian mass protests for freedom on the mind and all):

No. I'm sure it took a few good ones from Mass Effect and Deus Ex, and NOLF, and Fallout and KOTOR2 and NWN2 and the list goes on, which these games in turn took and refined from other games. Why does that bother you buddy?

Looks like they have competition (both in Australia and Britain) from a Europcar-Nissan partnership. Nissan plans to also rent and build charging stations in these countries plus a bunch of others: http://www.greentechmedia.com/green-light/...ric-rental-car/ My main concern is open standards and (obviously) standardisation. They guys will all have to get together and come up with a common method and form of recharging. E.g.: what battery specification will be used? What voltage? If we have 1 recharging station for ever petrol station, but only ever second one matches your battery type that would not be terribly good. I'm not sure there's any way to reconcile hydrogen and electric. Letting a hydrogen user park their car in an electric station to crack water into hydrogen would probably take hours (and be less efficient than cracking hydrogen industrially). I didn't even think they'd opt for hydrogen outside somewhere like Iceland (abundant geothermal) since the catalysis is amazingly energy intensive.

This scheme is being rolled out in Australia at the moment by some Israeli entrepreneur: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5il6f9U...0sQ-Ccd8vh5VANA Oh, except ours is batteries instead of catalytic fuel cells. cars like this really don't make sense outside of urban environments (not yet at least). imagine driving across 70 through the hell that is kansas in one of these and you'll quickly understand my point, refueling stations or no! taks But that's exactly the point: cars like 4WD don't make sense inside urban environments. Want to travel 320km and you've got a an electric car? Take a train or bus until the battery replacement network gets set up (and even then public transport just makes more sense, IMHO). Want to drive around an urban area 90% of the time? Use on of these, and definitely don't use a dangerous (for pedestrians and other vehicles) and petrol-guzzling 4WD. I bet people were saying the same thing about petrol guzzlers when they had horses and carts. "But what happens when the petrol runs out?!" A 4WD will always be better at handling horrid terrain than any urban car, of course, but I'm assuming that's not at issue here. Yep, but you've got to start somewhere right? In the past, you had to refuel at your house. Now they're penetrating major cities. Eventually it'll be suburban areas and then rural ones. It'll be interesting to see how this hydrogen network compares to the electric network in the early stages of roll-out over here. Will we end up seeing Britain on hydrogen and Australia on electric? Two mutually exclusive infrastructures and car models, no?

"Most gamers" aren't pirates so that's a blatant attempt at trolling. I'm curious how any of you were able to count them. We weren't. But it's highly suspect reasoning that most gamers are pirates!

I think most gamers are just excited to have opportunities to rationalize piracy. "Most gamers" aren't pirates so that's a blatant attempt at trolling.

Yes, let's not get ahead of ourselves here. But it goes without saying that if the game does not allow a crate as the main protagonist it's probably going to be an abysmal financial failure.

Yep!

That's an awesome Windmill! P.S.: less (bright/light?) colours on the iron shed - it's not a Christmas shed. The art is coming along nicely from those few shots, though.

I agree - I much prefer the old avatars. Seems like the only way is to not install HoW. You could maybe replace the bifs in your override directory but I'm not sure if that'd make the game crash or not (probably not, since there's no dual-wielding?) Do you know which files those would be? I could try by installing vanilla IWD to a different directory and copying them over. Worth a shot, since it would make the game much more enjoyable. Hell, if i worked for IWD, it could probably work for BG2, but then you have the dual-wielding problem. Hmm. I don't have IWD1 installed, sorry. But I think they'd be easy to find because I recall they had intuitive filenames. What's the TeamBG programme that unpacks the chitin.key file and lets you extract the spell/avatar/weapon/etc bif/bam files (animation files)? Let me check... OK, it's called WinBIFF, download it here: http://www.sorcerers.net/Games/IEmodding/index.php Edit: download Bamworkshop on the same page to view the animations to confirm they are what you want. Edit 2: I just checked and I do have IWD1 installed. I can see the bams for Arundel and bats and stuff but character avatars aren't immediately obvious... Edit 3: OK, found them. They're under data\CHRAnim.bif in the chitin.key file. I guess you'd just extract that entire part of the chitin.key file to your override directory once you've installed HoW? No guarentees. There could be hard-coded animation frame count differences between IWD1 and HoW. Edit 3: Supposing you get bored and want to make your own spells or items, the IEEP tool on that page is a gem for that. DaleKeeper can detect any items/spell you make and add to the Override directory, too, if you can't be bothered using the console in game (I couldn't!). Thanks Krez! I'll give it a try after uninstalling IWD+HOW+TotL and report back. Edit 1: Ok, I extracted ALL the files from CHRAnim.bif into the override directory. I didn't really want to fuss with searching for each individual one because there are so damn many. Here goes nothing. Edit 2: Well, that didn't work. I didn't get any error messages or anything, just that nothing was changed WTF. That's exactly what's NOT meant to happen. Try this: delete that entire directory from the chitin.key file using WinBiff (also delete those override files you extracted( and see if anything changes (hopefully it should crash because there's no animation files - if not, we've got the wrong suspect). Report back here with what your findings, soldier!

Oh, well, Morgoth the economic seer has spoken! You hear that Valve? It's all free sailing from here - you can just cruise along like Interplay did. With every single game sold in Steam, Valve makes a turnover on a daily basis. And the Steam library is growing every day, hence Valve gets richer every day. It's even more probable that MS goes down before Valve does. While I agree with you in theory, especially since I just played Portal, I still loathe the idea of not fully owning my game, as is the case with Steam (as I said, I've already lost HL2 once because I forgot my Steam password). And I certainly shouldn't have to rely on Valve's good grace and inability to fail!

I agree with Poland.

http://boingboing.net/2008/07/15/chinese-restaurant-c.html

Oh, well, Morgoth the economic seer has spoken! You hear that Valve? It's all free sailing from here - you can just cruise along like Interplay did. Um, I don't. Read the thread for once.

Yes. The gameplay is unique, and I personally find it fun. Story is decent enough so far. Nice graphics. What exactly was so unique about the gameplay. It was just a stripped down FPS. It was all about getting chased by helicopters and mercenaries, that's it. Run run run jump reload. meh. Portal was also just a stripped down FPS.

I agree - I much prefer the old avatars. Seems like the only way is to not install HoW. You could maybe replace the bifs in your override directory but I'm not sure if that'd make the game crash or not (probably not, since there's no dual-wielding?) Do you know which files those would be? I could try by installing vanilla IWD to a different directory and copying them over. Worth a shot, since it would make the game much more enjoyable. Hell, if i worked for IWD, it could probably work for BG2, but then you have the dual-wielding problem. Hmm. I don't have IWD1 installed, sorry. But I think they'd be easy to find because I recall they had intuitive filenames. What's the TeamBG programme that unpacks the chitin.key file and lets you extract the spell/avatar/weapon/etc bif/bam files (animation files)? Let me check... OK, it's called WinBIFF, download it here: http://www.sorcerers.net/Games/IEmodding/index.php Edit: download Bamworkshop on the same page to view the animations to confirm they are what you want. Edit 2: I just checked and I do have IWD1 installed. I can see the bams for Arundel and bats and stuff but character avatars aren't immediately obvious... Edit 3: OK, found them. They're under data\CHRAnim.bif in the chitin.key file. I guess you'd just extract that entire part of the chitin.key file to your override directory once you've installed HoW? No guarentees. There could be hard-coded animation frame count differences between IWD1 and HoW. Edit 3: Supposing you get bored and want to make your own spells or items, the IEEP tool on that page is a gem for that. DaleKeeper can detect any items/spell you make and add to the Override directory, too, if you can't be bothered using the console in game (I couldn't!).

Yes. The gameplay is unique, and I personally find it fun. Story is decent enough so far. Nice graphics.

1 million units is not at all solid when you're expecting to sell 3 million. EA would've done their books expecting 3 million, which essentially means the game was a loss. Feargus could explain it better. In fact, I believe he did here. Yes it did. You had to activate it online, you had to type in a serial key, you had to have a Securom check periodically or the game would crash, and if you installed it on more than 5 machines it'd call you a pirate. You think it had no DRM and you think it was boring - are we even talking about the same game?

The thing about Steam is, how can we trust them when they say they'll remove DRM if Valve goes under? Blizzard has their history to back them up - look how they released no-cd patches for Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3. I like to own tangible copies of my games, but I don't think I do with Steam. I lost my Steam account password for HL2 once and hence lost the game. Cracks are illegal in Australia, just FYI. I do not care - they shouldn't put such restrictive DRM on games I've bought.

I'm just playing Mirror's Edge now. It's pretty fun, but I think they could've added some more advanced stealth elements. Or maybe that'd break the 'flow' too much. I like the intuitiveness of most of the acrobatic moves and places to jump to. I'm up to the SWAT team and the elevator, and it's pretty bright and sunny for a dystopian world. The guy campaigning for reform was shot and that chick framed, but that seems more like corruption than anything, and that happens in a lot of places, but those aren't dystopias... I mean, there's no Soma, I haven't seen all that many CCTV cameras, there's plenty of news services... OK so the cops ARE shooting you for no reason, and you DO have SWAT teams after you for no reasons... maybe I should keep playing Apparently this game didn't do well but they're still making a sequel and possibly trilogy? EQ expected it to sell 3 million copies - how many did it sell? Maybe that'll teach them not to put in such ****ing restrictive DRM. Seriously, do they think gamers are all latent criminals?

They don't. Many people use their search bar though - 95% of Mozilla's funding comes from search bar royalties. Mozilla funding is used to make the product better for the user according to the FOSS (free and open source) philosophy, which is why it's a not-for-profit, and not publically listed (and hence not legally bound to generate profit for shareholders). It's hardly an explanation because I didn't think anybody would want to know. Alright, well, as you hopefully know, Google offers a lot of web-app based products like Google Mail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, etc, many of which are direct competitors to non-cloud based (offline) products from Microsoft and others. Because of this, it's in Google's best interests to push the envelope of web browser capabilities so that what's possible in a web browser is identical to what's possible in pre-compiled binaries like Microsoft Office (ideally). As such, this involves things like speeding up Javascript speed, rendering, and adding new standards such as Open 3d. The more powerful your web browser is (pretty much the more like an operating system, which is at least part of the reason for Chrome's sandbox model - the other being good security), the better Google can make its products - products that compete with Microsoft. Which ties back into Microsoft's own reasons for trying to maintain IE market share, even though most people think they give it away for free as good Samaritans (I can assure you, they don't waste those millions on giving away IE free for your benefit). That reason being: the more people using the deliberately slow IE, the lower the quality of Google's online offerings for most people (IE users), and hence the less likelihood Google's offerings steal market-share (and hence money) from Microsoft. Even if Chrome fails to gain traction, the worst case scenario for Google is that it continues to fund Firefox (searchbar royalties is essentially Google's way of funding Firefox without getting into taxation problems) which is itself many times faster than IE, and beholden only to users and developers, and if Chrome can push Firefox, Opera, Safari and IE to compete more in the process, that's gravy (it already has, sparking a browser speed war which IE is losing badly). But another obvious advantage of Chrome, for Google, is that it uses Google search by default, so that's search market share in the bag for every Chrome user they gain (and that means more financial security, and more people to target ads to, and hence more revenue). They aren't complying with the EU. The EU asked them to wait for their verdict to be passed, and Microsoft said "No, we'll pass our own verdict ahead of you instead", hoping to pressure the EU by sparking exactly this kind of debate here in this thread by looking like a victim. The EU obviously wasn't moved, so that part of the plan backfired, but I imagine they're still happy they made the EU look like the bad guy, even though EU actually considers all the things I've mentioned above when making their decisions on browser anti-trust matters.

Pleeeeeeeeeease just be something unobtrusive like a disc-check and/or a serial key. I hate having to download cracks. And if you're really nice guys, you could remove the disc check in a patch after a couple of years once it's served its purpose, like Blizzard does with their games.