Mr W Phallus

I totally agree that the previous love interest were completely uninteresting and superfluous to the story. With Catwoman though I'm hoping she will actually be used to fuck with Bruce's head, thereby having a significant impact on the events of the story. Of course it's all very well saying what I hope for, she could just be another boring superfluous romance plot tacked on for the sake of having a love interest. :/ We'll see.

Heheh I jumped out of the Mage's Quarter in Imperial City. There's something immensely satisfying about breaking the rules of a video game. Then I remembered I hadn't saved for a while and panicked, but I managed to get back into city with some third person camera trickery on the wrong side of the doors.

Personally I think the implications of throwing a sexually-charged criminal love interest into the mix have a lot of potential. Sure, as an individual character she's not quite as interesting as the joker - few characters are ever going to be as interesting as a utterly deranged criminal genius - but the relationship between Catwoman and Batman is more interesting than the Joker/Batman relationship (at least at the beginning, before Batman starts feeling responsible for Joker's crimes) because it challenges Batman's black and white view of morality.

Like HH said, the protagonist of a film (or novel or play) is usually someone you empathise, or at least sympathise with. Beyond that however, there is a difference between a character the audience is meant to dislike and a character who gets on your nerves. In the case of Black Swan it was because I think Aronofsky overplayed the fragility and frigidity of Nina's character early on in the film a little bit too much (which links back to the lack of subtlety I mentioned). She spends so much time on the verge of tears that the character becomes one dimensional, like she only has one reaction to everything. And like I said in the first place, that didn't stop it from being very watchable. If the other elements of the film hadn't been for the most part very good, then the fact the protagonist was a bit annoying could have been a problem.

Both. I don't know if it's still in development but those stat bars just look incredibly out of place for what must be the skills tab. And then the skills tab is some scroll-y looking thing. Everything the community has been doing with Bethesda games is ensuring there's as much information in as little space as possible and yet they seem to not be getting the hint. Will their next game have entire full-screen info-graphics on one specific skill with lore back story to them too? I agree that the scrolling thing is pointless, though I do quite like the constellation idea, I've no idea why they didn't just put all the constellations on one screen.

Well I'm a bit late on this one but I finally watched Black Swan. Whilst lacking in subtlety, Aronofsky's camera work does a beautiful job of capturing the emotion of the dancing, the performances are great and the usage of mirrors is fantastic. The character of Nina got on my nerves a bit but that didn't stop it from being very watchable. I'd have liked to see it at the cinema though.

When you say it looks terrible do you mean aesthetically terrible or just in terms of practicality and usage it looks terrible? Because while I can see reasons you might fault it on the latter I'm struggling to see how you can say it's not nice to look at.

I'm going to put words into RockyRan's mouth hear but basically whether Nintendo is being hypocritical depends on your definition of a hardcore gamer. The way I see it there are 3 vague groups of gamers and 2 of these groups could be labelled as 'hardcore'. The first group is the most obvious and also the newest and these are the casual gamers. People who dip into games, are probably most familiar with the current generation of Nintendo consoles, quite possibly express their enjoyment of a game by prefacing their sentence with the word actually. They probably have little interest in 'traditional' gaming genres like FPS, RPGs and so on. The second group, and the first of the 'hardcore' groups is the Halo/CoD generation. Probably containing the highest proportion of male teenagers, these are the people who play videogames on a regular basis but only have (or at least play) a handful of games in their collection. They will follow gaming news enough to know when the next CoD/Halo/Fifa/Madden is coming out, but other than that they will probably only pick up titles which attract a lot of attention or top the gaming charts. They will probably write off 'casual' games for being cutesy, childish or aimed at mums. The final group is the one that probably everyone on the forum will fit in. They are, for want of a better word, the gaming nerds (I don't mean that in a pejorative sense). They follow gaming news closely, will probably be heavy internet users, they will be most likely to own multiple gaming platforms or have a gaming PC, their (extensive) gaming library will contain games played by both of the other groups, as well as niche titles that neither group has even heard of. They probably realise that the term 'hardcore' is inadequate in categorising types of gamers although out of the 2 groups really they are the ones most deserving of that title. Personally I didn't catch Nintendo's press conference, so I couldn't say which of the two 'hardcore' groups they were aiming for, although if the sales figures for games like CoD and Halo etc are anything to go by then the second group is the most likely. If, however, Rockyran interpreted the Nintendo press conference to mean that they were targeting the third group, or us in other words, who are after all probably the ones who buy the most games individually (although not necessarily as a group), then I can see why it would sound like hypocrisy.

Well I did type out a reply about how Bioshock was morphing into the Them Park Sim genre but from a customers perspective but then my internet crashed so all I'll say is this: well actually that was everything I said in the first place just put more succinctly. XD

Roller coasters now included.

True, the dimensions aren't so much unrealistic, it was just very noticeable when his hand is round her throat (I thought the gesture was very emotionally powerful). The fact that, being entirely artificial creations, someone must have made the decision to make the character's proportions that way interests me though. I like reading into things.

Some random thoughts from watching the GTTV demo... (Not really spoilers but just in case you want to watch the demo yourself without any prior knowledge) All in all I've got high hopes for the story and the world they've created, I'll wait and see if the gameplay lives up to that.

If you want to see a comedy go see Bridesmaids (if it's still on in the US).

Stolen from this blog.

And Sauron in the second one. These first pics appeared a couple of days ago but in case anyone hasn't seen them: They're pretty horribly lit and just not very well composed in general. The Ori, Dori and Nori designs son't feel very Tolkien to me either. So safe to say I'm not loving the pics that have been shown so far, hopefully these early stills aren't reflective of the finished film.

There's a lot of mention of D-pads being crap, especially the 360, and yes it is crap but I'm struggling to think of any game where it matters that much. I rarely use the d-pad at all beyond switching weapons in Gears of War and similar for which it does the job. So are all you guys just going against it on principle or am I just missing out on some d-pad extensive games? With the exception of fighting games which I don't really play (but at the end of the day any fighting control pales in comparison to an actual fighting stick) I can't think of any myself but feel free to enlighten me. Edit: On an unrelated note, I'm used to playing Fifa on my mates PS3, earlier today though I played it on another mates xbox and I definitely felt more comfortable playing the xbox version. Maybe they were using slightly different settings but it certainly felt to me like using the 360 controller upped my game a bit.

Just got back form seeing Akira on the big screen. Well worth the 50 minute journey.

Yeh some of the Batman/Alfred conversation was worse though. 'Alfred I took an encryption key from a tiger guard, I'm going to hack into their communications' because if Alfred wasn't kept up to date with that vital piece of information, everything would go to shit. If it's not obvious what you need to do they should at least have Batman talk to himself (since we are in comic book territory) or just have the game do it for you. It's not like the player gains anything by manually getting out the gadget themselves. Needless to say I'm just nitpicking here.

There's something about the animations - especially the Batman can fly ones - that just isn't sitting right with me at the moment. :/ Hopefully it'll stop bothering me when I'm actually the one in control. Other than that, the dialogue seems spot on; just the right amount of cheese and cliché.

Well it's mostly just a coincidence, but I restarted Ocarina of Time the other day and just realised how fitting it was for this thread. I'm pretty much at the point I got to the first time I started playing it (just got the hookshot). I should probably point out that I'm playing the Gamecube Zelda Anniversary Collection version and I've only had my Gamecube a couple of years, so it's not like I've been waiting 12 years to finish the game, but still it's about time I experienced the Water temple for myself I reckon. Don't know if I'll tackle the rest of my backlog this summer (and I just added 10 games in the last 48 hours, cheers Steam) but top of the pile would definitely be Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood which is still in it's rapper (I was going to correct this but the mental image is too amusing).

I went on a man-date with a friend yesterday to see Bridesmaids. More of a triumph for good films and comedy than for feminism as many 'woo girl-power' wannabe feminists are claiming it to be. Kristen Wiig is brilliant.

God I hope that Tom Hanks was just bullshitting. Even though I'd trust Pixar to do a good job of it, I'd much rather they put their enormous talent to making new, original films.

I've always enjoyed the feel of a 360 controller. I've only ever used wireless ones and I enjoy having the weight, the battery at the back has never bothered me and the size and shape fits pretty much perfectly in my hands (which aren't particularly large). The place where it beats PS3 controllers hands down though is the triggers, which are a pleasure to use on the 360 but are the most awkward things ever on the PS3, my fingers just slip off them. It's probably because I've never owned a Sony console myself but PS3 controllers just feel too small and flimsy for me. Shout out to the Dreamcast for laying the foundation for the xbox controller. Am I right in saying it was the first controller to have triggers?

There was a little fact box about that on the side of the BBC article. Roundabouts are definitely the best option for junctions, providing everyone knows how to use them, which I guess is the major problem for implementing them in the US. They can be implemented poorly, though, they recently built a 'through-a-bout' near me which is a roundabout with a road going across it and traffic lights (already defeating one of the main advantages of a roundabout) to switch between normal roundabout mode and driving straight across mode and all it's done is make traffic worse, another roundabout near me just isn't big enough for the amount of traffic it gets.

Bacon butty, definitely. I'd also use it for a fish finger butty. I probably wouldn't use it for much else but I'm pretty sure I've heard people refer to all sorts of sandwich as a butty. Could be a Northern thing.