MasterDex

The words coming out of the mouths of many anti-Hotz people are horrible. He should die for wanting the freedom to modify his property? He should be raped in prison because he wants to share his knowledge? It seems that the SDF are using Hotza as a icon of disdain to project all their anger onto. There were people exploiting and pirating PS3 games before Hotz came on the scene and while what Hotz did might make things easier for those nefarious people, those were not his intentions. We don't ban screwdrivers because they can be used to kill. We don't ban DVD-burners because they can be used to pirate. We don't ban torrents because they can be used to distribute pirate material. And we shouldn't give up our rights to modify systems that we OWN because the modifications can be used for nefarious deeds. I can't donate anything but I wish him the best and I hope he wins the lawsuit, for the sake of us all.

Thanks for the info. I thought it might have been a bug as it seemed like I could click through the black screen. Gonna fire it up now and give it another go.

Total War tends to be one of those games that likes to disable my ATI gamma settings, I don't know if that's the same problem you're having but ATITrayTools works as a fix, allowing you to activate a gamma profile while in-game. I didn't play much fo the Shogun demo. I downloaded it like the minute it was out and when I loaded into the battle, I got a black screen with the start battle button, is this right? I was expecting the option to arrange my troops before I started. Anyway, without the chance to get a good look at what I was playing with and where they all were (I know, I should have paused, it just dawned on me now) I got whooped pretty fast. I didn't spend any more time with it as I had to be somewhere but I'm going to load it up today and have another go at it. I'll definitely be getting Shogun 2 anyway. I love the Total War series.

I downloaded the PC demo, played it, got annoyed and bored and quit it. I'm sure many will enjoy it but it's not what I wanted. The environments look bland and empty and the characters, while they look a bit more natural than Origins characters, are of noticeably lower detail. The combat, from what I played, was as exciting as watching paint dry and required as much thinking as scratching my balls does. Maybe I'm being pessimistic, maybe what I've played isn't a good indicator of the full game. It seems Bioware want it to be Mass Effect - Fantasy Edition and it seems as if they've succeeded somewhat in that goal. However, from what I've played, I can say that I don't see myself buying Dragon Age II. I enjoyed Mass Effect for what it was but this isn't what I wanted from Dragon Age. Edit: for anyone that's downloading slow. Try use a download accelerator, it seems to work well. I use DownThemAll for Firefox and was getting between 1mb/s-2.5mb/s download speed.

That was my point really. There's no method more correct than the other but if we were to rate them, it would be logical to assume the most common method was the correct one. In the end, we all have our own way of doing things, as this thread certainly shows.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmgZ4UaFqwA Nobuo Uematsu is a musical god!

Ugh! You are so right. The correct way is Month, day, year. There is no logic to dd/mm/yyyy. The last day of the year at 12/31/2011 has a distinct smaller to larger pattern. If you want to say 31 December 2011 then at least that makes some sense by dividing the month and the year but MM/DD/YYYY is by far the more logical and thus the correct version. I disagree. While mm/dd/yyyy may make more logical sense from a mathematical standpoint, dd/mm/yyyy makes more sense from a cognitive standpoint. Before you have a complete year, you have months and before you have a complete month, you have days so dd/mm/yyyy is more readily understandable. Then there's the fact that the US is practically the only place that uses the mm/dd/yyyy format as standard and the dd/mm/yyyy format is the most widespread globally so if we're going to say there's one correct format, it'd be the dd/mm/yyyy format and the mm/dd/yyyy format is the least correct.

Proudest moment? That's a hard one. I think it was when I got my first star and it's the same star I still have today (I don't know how though, I respond to so many trolls, it's ridiculous I still have one). I got a second star not to long ago but I can't remember what for. It wasn't a comment I expected to get nominated for comment of the week though. Anyway, the comment that got me my star was my first and only attempt at getting a comment of the week and it actually paid off. It was in a TF2 related post and was a rendition of the 12 days of Christmas focusing on the updates, I've actually come across a few more TF2 update related adaptions since then. I can't for the life of me find the post though. I wish I could.

Nice write-up Dean. That Sterling article really annoyed me. It was completely one-sided and it's fools like him that are perpetuating the "PC is dying/full of pirates/not worth the effort" mantra. These are people who couldn't give a rat's arse about examining the bigger picture and would instead prefer to leap on piracy as the goto scapegoat of failed studios and flopped games. Here's Ubisoft's justification of the 'alyways-on' DRM they brought in with Assassins Creed 2: "In the end it all comes back to one single truth: piracy is a big, huge, hairy problem. It's a market that suffered a lot because of piracy, and we're all just trying to figure out what we think is the best way to deal with it." (source) Everyone is trying to figure out their own way to solve the big piracy problem but it seems only Valve are content in accepting it for what it is - a constant factor in the market. Piracy won't ever go away, be it on a console, a PC or while you're sailing the seven seas. There are always going to be pirates and what the industry needs to do is change their stance from "Let's figure out how to solve this problem." to "Let's figure out how to reduce this problem.". It seems like mere semantics but it's more than that. It's a change in how piracy is dealt with. We're going from "How do we keep the pirates away?" to "How do we make more people buy our game?". When you treat every customer as a potential pirate/criminal, you just scare them away. I haven't bought a single Ubisoft game for PC since they brought in their new DRM model (for the record, I didn't pirate any either) because I don' want the headache of having to deal with it...that and I'm still iffy on the quality of Ubisoft's PC ports. It just annoys me that after we've dealt with piracy in all its forms that we still think it's something that can be solved. Piracy will always exist and it's about goddamn time we stop pretending that we can do something to change that fact and start working towards reducing its effects.

Unfortunately, I don't have any decent picture of me. Seriously. There are like none in existance whatsoever. It seems people only carry cameras when I'm very tired, very drunk, very tired and drunk or stoned. To make up for that, here's me and Excel_Excel having what I presume was an intense debate.

You may be right about them trying to use this as an excuse to go console only. I'm not ready to give up on them just yet however. Metro 2033, while it pushed boundaries was also fairly badly optimised too. It was a good effort all the same. I find it hard to believe the few graphics options there will be what we'll have in the final version...at least, I don't want to believe it. I think we'll know exactly what direction Crytek is going when the game officially releases.

Whoever is to blame, at least there's that. It's a real shame that there are people working in the industry that don't have any respect for the work that goes into making a game. I just hope this doesn't keep Crytek from devoting time to the PC platform, it'd be a shame if one of the only developers pushing the boudaries of technology were to give up and be content with just staying afloat on consoles.

What's even worse is that if Kotick was half the businessman he thinks he is, he'd have seen what happened when Probst was doing pretty much the same thing Kotick is now doing during his time as CEO of EA and would have recognised how bad of an idea it is to throw all your eggs in one basket. Activision needs to get some quality new IPs to market if they don't want to see what happened to EA happen to them. Guitar Hero is dead? Good Riddance. Rock Band and Harmonix are better anyway.

I watched The Troll Hunter the other day. It's a Norweigen movie done in the mockumentary style about a group of young film-makers who stumble upon a Troll Hunter and discover a government conspiracy to cover up the existence of trolls. It sounds corny as all hell but it's fairly well done, all things considered.

Mmmmmmm......Possibly. I think there may have been one or two I haven't seen. The person below me has never heard of the movie Oldboy but thought Repo Men's corridor scene was really great and original.

I can't really see the NGP being any more than $300. I can see it maybe being $350 at most but Sony won't want to price themselves out of the largest demographic and it's not going to look too attractive if the NGP costs more than a PSP. I've heard the argument made that they're going after the iPad/iPhone "up-market" demographic but I believe they'd be incredibly stupid to do so, especially with 3rd party developer support for a new Sony handheld being a hard sell after the PSP. The NGP is packed full of technology and it's certainly going to be more expensive than the 3DS but I think it'll be a reasonable price.

Chuck Norris has nothing on this old woman

With my beard, long hair and hairy chest, I may as well be! The person below me thinks they have a chance to be a millionaire.

You're lucky it is! Otherwise I'd be running down to lay the smackdown on you for that!

The whole 'PC gaming is dead' mantra is a fallacy that's been around as long as consoles have. As soon as there's a new generation of consoles, there's a drop off in the amount of PC games being released and sales decrease. The latest generation of consoles saw the biggest migration of developers that I can remember and I believe that's more indicitive of the increase in people getting into gaming this generation than the health of the PC gaming industry. With more new gamers starting their gaming careers on consoles than ever before, it's no wonder we saw such a large migration. Like the generations before however, developers soon realize that PC gamers aren't an insignificant minority and start coming back over a generations lifecycle. This is why it felt like PC gaming was the strongest it had been in years back before the release of the latest generation. In otherwords, PC gaming ebbs and flows in unison with the console generations. I think things are changing this generation however. With the console manufacturers saying they want to squeeze more life out of this generations consoles than ever before, the PC should have more time to recover from the initial migration and grow stronger. The ever-increasing strength of Steam has also helped immensely in keeping PC gaming alive and kicking and it seems more and more up and coming independant developers are seeing the benefits of releasing PC games. In my opinion, PC gaming is stronger than it's ever been right now and it's only getting stronger. That said, expect the advent of the next generation of consoles to coincide with a drop-off in PC releases. Disclaimer: The above is my own analysis and should not be treated as fact.

Me?! But Why?!

I've got a bunch of poetry I wrote when I was around 17-19. I won't share them all here right now but I'll throw in a few and if you like them, I'll throw up some more. They're mostly melancholic or atheistic in theme though so if that's not your thing, you've been warned.

Ha! Yeah, you're right. I blame Hot_Heart. He spelled it wrong first! I'm not surprised you haven't heard gombeen, it's not used much here these days and is drifting into obscurity even here. Gobshite is alive and well though. Oh and did you know FCUK threatened to sue the company that produced those Feck T-shirts? http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/article393415.ece

For some reason, I expected a lot more people to comment here. GT5 sold loads, didn't it? I've been playing the series since the first one but it wasn't until the second game that I started being able to play decently (Thanks to the help of a Kiwi and the dual analog method), I've been enamoured with it ever since. We should try to get a few races going, maybe if there's enough willing to participate, we could even set up a tournament.