deanb

I've heard a few duplicated audio-logs when you hack into phone conversations, but not much in way of general NPC or security types repeating conversations.

http://imgur.com/a/iUCiV#1 Not my screenshots but stuff like the above is one of the things I quite like about Watch_Dogs so far. It really feels like an actual living world around you rather than a bunch of faceless NPCs walking around the streets on a pre-set path. There;s people chatting on park benches, taking pictures, walking by while chatting on thier phone, waiting for busses, having a party, listening to tunes etc. It's quite fun to soak in the atmosphere.

Yeah archaeologists reckon we made beer before bread. It's much easier to make. And I guess also means bread is best made while drunk.

I can understand the "trigger warning" as it was intended, but as you say it's been abused to the point of meaningless. I find a lot of stuff like that seem to originate through Tumblr.

I struggle with RTS games. I enjoy them, great LAN games to play back at uni. But my usual tactic was to go in one great big group since the whole management of many levels of units that all interact and flank and shit just goes way over my head. I imagine similar would be with Portal. It requires at least a basic understanding of spacial awareness and there can be people that lack that.

Yeah the UKIP exposure has been pretty fucking terrible. Understandable with the EU front since in the end they did get a decent amount of seats. But for the local election coverage Labour handily came out well ahead, UKIP dropped in votes, Lib Dems got decimated, Tories lost power in many councils, Greens doubled, and UKIP still doesn't hold a single council. Yet you'd think from the coverage they now had total control. It's even worse for UKIP since the EU vote will have had plenty of anti-EU (and others) lot out to vote for UKIP, and yet in Local Elections for the people actually doing stuff on their doorstep they still voted for Labour and what not. It kind of feels like all the papers are getting different numbers from the rest of the nation, despite the front page of BBC having all the results posted live. Did hear a great remark about how fun the BBC World Cup coverage will be if fourth place is a winning position.

To be fair they're not aiming for some MCU like super arc, and on top of that it's "The Wolverine" rather than "X-Men: Wolverine". I think it's meant to be standalone (beyond the post-credits) As for Quicksilver, his apperance in pre-release media was pretty sucky looking. But it's not like they could put the whole scene (a decent chunk of his appearance in the film) up as a trailer since it'd spoil a huge highlight of the film.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27587558 Googles self driving car due to be out within a year (though I think that's the initial test run than full production) I totally want one. The idea of fleshy human being behind the wheel of a 2 ton vehicle capable of going over 100mph scares the shit out of me. Also this particular model looks the perfect city run about. I wonder what the price would be, because if it was cheap enough then I'd definitely eye one up.

http://www.dorkly.com/post/63432/x-men-psas

The post credits scene is quite a bit into the credits. I don't think the projectionist even knew it was coming up (normally lights are left down if there's a post/mid-credits scene as theoretically the film still hasn't ended).

"no dean it's totally not a marketing term" "with most mainstream marketing" "level of promotion" Seriously, no one honestly grasping its use as a marketing term where it's mainstream if you're told it's mainstream. The wiki itself states its origin comes from the Seal of Quality, just one that can be used by any in the game. And would you guys honestly believe that most of the AAA games that come out now are defect free? Heck onto the change of the term as the wiki article Ethan is using states it then became in line with a the ratings scores. But then hey it became even more advanced than that. Don't need to know the scores or the launch quality of the game because: A game is AAA because you are told it's AAA. Interstellar Marines is an AAA game. Cost roughly $125,000+ to make, far below that of the GTA's and CODs. But it is an AAA game. It says right thier on their page. They can say it because it's a meaningless marketing term. No one from ASA is going to be coming down to check their books and make sure they spent $25million on advertising their game. It doesn't have to conform to a specific metacritic rating. It doesn't have to have a set amount of sales in order to call their game an AAA game. Come on guys, how many gameplay trailers of the beta of the upcoming must-have AAA games do we need to go through before realising that the marketing departments are quite capable of putting out any old bullcrap terms to build hype, media attention and hopefully sales, before people realise the trailer was in-engine, nothing was changed from the beta and the game buggy as hell but with a marketing budget far surpassing the development budget.

Yeah, would be kind of the point. Many are saying that AAA = Blockbuster. But as you say many folks wouldn't class "blockbuster" games as AAA. It just doesn't really neatly fit. AAA games are the games we're told are AAA.

The internet shitting a brick about an indie darling? Unlikely. If the term had meaning then it would be defined. It's like calling a game "pretty" or "innovative". There's not much beyond opinion on it. Many have said it's based on money, but how much and from what? Money spent or money taken? Can Indie titles be AAA or only titles made by publishers? Can a phone game be AAA? Is it based on review scores? Blockbuster is defined by the takings. Which would mean for a direct translation AAA games would include the likes of: Minecraft, Wii Play, Nintendogs, Wii Fit (in fact a lot of Nintendo games), Angry Birds, League of Legends etc. Which does highlight a minor issue in the "blockbuster" stuff in that blockbuster is based on the cinema takings, games don't have the two-stage life cycle of films. Movies don't also tend to show the film for free, with optional scenes or new outfits for the actors purchasable as you watch. So it's a pretty hard analogy to directly translate to gaming without skipping a pretty hefty amount of non-console games. Though I would imagine for many people they wouldn't mind that since they probably might not consider anything out of the non-indie, console only, non-F2P spectrum to be able to be "AAA". Which this wouldn't at all be related to the fact console games from top publishers tend to have those top marketing budgets with their "gameplay" trailers for their must-have "AAA" games.

Doesn't matter about US involvement

Days of Future Past Pretty damn good film, I think it blended between the past and future well, my only issue being in how certain motivations/actions of people would "fix" the future (though the "how the initial future came about" was pretty solid). Oh other issue being the whole Shadowcat temporal astral projection shit, but they don't even bother explaining it so I guess they figured it'd be best to just ignore that she walks through walls and not astral projection.

It'll be interesting to find out what happened with that behind the scenes. I would hope it's not similar to Favreau on Iron Man 2 (mainly cos I'd like to think they'd learn their lesson of not butting in with too much MCU stuff).

This should be good.

Yeah, you're sending mixed messages on the whole, earlier calling Ethans definition being too vague, saying AAA means something specific (while you've yet to give these specifics) and then saying Ethan's analogy is good enough for you. I guess you slept on it. Give it another sleep and you'll likely be on the "it's bullshit marketing term" bandwagon. Ethan even says in his interpretation it's the heavily marketed games. Why'd you think you mentally associate "AAA" with "heavily marketed"? Meaningless bullshit marketing terms is what makes a lot of the games industry go around. Hence Ethan spending a fair chunk of today raging about the "gameplay" video for Arkham Knight. Of course Ethan also bought an Xbox One so...

Yeah a lot of folks have highlighted the missing "s" in "vs" makes it less a fight and more of a court room drama on the damages Superman owes to the city of Metropolis.

I may have gone with an absurdist angle on my last posts, but at least I maintain consistency. So yeah, I agree on your "waste of time" part.

Well I could go put it back under PS Vita, but that actually is a specific thing. If AA wasn't a subjective bull crap marketing term, then please enlighten the rest of us, including the guy who has to make sure marketing don't actually make any false claims, on the "specifics" of what makes one game AAA and the other not. Or is "you are stupid" the best you got?