metadigital

I think that was a good example of keeping the audiences attention: that must be the most famous of all Shakespeare's lines in all his work, so the fact that there is a chance it wasn't said helps to differentiate the tv series, sustain some anticipation from the audience as they strain to hear the phrase, and underscore the uncertainty inherent in historical recording (due to apologists, renaissances and revisionists, or whatever). I thought that worked well, though I confess I was waiting to see if he spoke, and if he spoke in Italian (like some of the other key lines!). Maybe, as the ScottishMartialArtist intimates, the problem is having to dumb down the show to the lowest common denominator. Maybe Mel Gibson could re-do it, all in latin?

Out of the mouths of babes and Volos ...

I see psychotropics are not unusual in Japan.

Hmmm, back trouble and no sporting / exercise in your 30s ... do we see a connection?

Except that you are laughing about the misfortune of others!

I thought the plot was pretty easy to discern from the film (haven't read the book).

As you say, it's far too early to tell. A console's controller is not a bad thing, in and of itself; it's only if the developers haven't done any bespoke PC development that the game will suffer.

You don't think having irradiated giant pigs as police is creative? Or a weapon that shrinks your opponent so that you can step on them is creative? In a FPS?

I just watched it and it is [expletive deleted] excellent. It gave me pause for thought, though; do the developers populate the game with current technology, or (like a period piece) do they use the technology of the time the game was first made? E.g. the computer that Gordon interacts with: should it have a bulky CRT monitor (like in the original), or a nifty flatscreen (as is available and commonplace now)? This is complicated by the fact that the game is set in the-not-to-distant-future. :D I was about to compose a witty retort when I remembered that you haven't played any of the Half-Lifes yet.

Apart from the crash, that sounds kewl!

What that game called again? Your point only holds for the type of computing we use today. Neural nets and massively parallel computer paradigms will more effectively battle with the human pattern-matching heuristics and even eventually beat them.

Keep the comments to the topic, people, please. I'll be very pleased when this makes it to the stores; these guys have already proven they have some excellent creative talent.

I started the next sequential topic with the last page of the last topic so that people could carry on seamlessly ... or so I thought. Half-Life 2:Episode 1 (with the developer dialog track) Space Rangers 2 (restarted after my last game was trashed when my harddrive was lost).

Salesmanship.

Trailer available now!

All of the games take time no? ^_^ <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Don't be obtuse.

Actually, Christianity is a bridge between the older religions and their sacrificial purifications (e.g. the witchdoctor can be sacrificed

I'm not worried about being bored, I'm concerned about being dissuaded from starting a game because of the huge time investment it will take.

Indeed, education programs need a funds injection, real bad. <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Excellent. I always check out the noses, especially on front elevation portraits, as artists of greater and lesser renown seem to have trouble with them. Yours is great.

You're just jealous of the leaf.

Of course not, but if it takes over six hours for 50 years at the fastest rate, then a game is going to take forever. 50 years is not enough time to do much of anything, except in the demo which allows for everything up to and including colonization, and is helped by a gimped AI. It's just that if every game is a large investment, then it will put me off (and probably a lot of others, too). The only solution would be to re-play a lot of saved games, I suppose.

I doubt they actually had a "factory": they barely had a prototype (the Hydrogen bomb test completely surprised them with its power, so it's not a big stretch to suppose that they cobbled it together from the spare parts lying around the Manhattan Engineering District). Note to self: don't be lazy and look up details when using them in examples. Hey, some competition for WW2 Pacific battles!

Scratches on CD/DVDs cause problems with the laser reading the data (and probably writing too, if that ever were the case); this can be fixed with some metal polish to remove the scratches. This isn't the case with the next-gen Blu-Ray-/HD-DVDs, however, as the data is laid so close to the surface that a "normal" scratch could quite easily damage the data layer. Apart from that there have been cases of incompatibilities though this is typically between different early adopter technology implementers' hardware.

Wake-up call: when the publishers give "minimum specifications", it doesn't mean "minimum specifications to get the title screen to display", it means "minimum specifications to play the game to its conclusion, however painful it might be at times whilst the harddrive thrashes to keep up with the virtual memory requirements or the GPU overheats trying to produce more than single-digit framerates, etc." The fact that you got the game to play was good fortune; to expect that this gives you some sort of supernatural guarantee to play Doom 3 on your Casio wristwatch is just foolish.