deanb

Well yeah ours mainly focus on food, you need more food than clothes and TVs after all. Seems Wikipedia classifies them as "Hypermarkets" (Then noted that it's not a term in use in the US. Nor is it over here. So no idea which country wrote that article)

Supermarkets sell food, clothing, electronic goods, stationary, books, music, films, games etc Like Wal-Marts. A grocers sells fruit n veg. Due to the small size of the UK you'd struggle to be an hour away from a game store, even with GAME closing down a bunch of theirs there's still plenty small chains amount, like we've got Grainger Games up north. Then there's those in-between like CEX, HMV and electronics stores. They sell games (CEX just do second hand), but it's not their main focus but enough so to pull from specialists.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/supermarkets-are-now-the-uk-s-biggest-games-retailers/0106556 Just to revive this a bit: Supermarkets now outsell specialist game stores in the UK. Though given GAME fucked up early this year and closed down half their stores I'm not surprised.

http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/call-of-duty-declassifed-is-horrible-but-its-sony-who-will-be-punished A decent article on the fiasco that has been COD Blops Declassified. (Though going off what you lot have been saying he seems to be unfairly laying into AC Liberation)

http://sharpsuits.net/ hehe

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20374139 I was only meant to be joking the other week when I said "Now we've all stayed up to watch the US elections whose doing the PCC one". Fuck 15% turnout. To be honest I didn't vote (should maybe set myself up for voting here actually) and I've not really a clue what the fuck is going on, it seemed like it was meant to be a police thing but all the candidates were of political parties, which I think most of the nation just got completely confused about. Police n politics shouldn't really mix (especially after the whole leveson n pleb stuff)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6oau3cKjkU It's ramping up for the finale....

...on the blank discs. You know nobody that burns stuff to disc? People who still put home movies onto VHS tapes. Still sticking to Floppy disks for back-up. Heck even if you're not using a blank disc you'd have to have never ever put a DVD in your computer too since that prints the capacity out on My Computer.

I've read that it should do. But I guess we'll see how that pans out next week. I'm not sure on what magic they're doing with the Wii U that couldn't work on the Wii.

And now the trailer Killer snowmen! Given it's now midnight I'm beginning to wonder if there was going to be a Dr Who short on CiN

If they're externally powered they don't use the Y-splitter. Y-splitter is used for a power boost off a secondary USB port, mainly for portable hard drives (which you kinda shouldn't be using/wasting on a Wii U anyway). Sure you can plug a flash drive in, it won't blow the flash drive or Wii U up. It just won't do anything interesting like store saves or games on it. Their reasoning being that flash memory only has so many read writes. Which is why they made that the main storage of the Wii U itself.....

Oh I've just noticed something Excel said so I'll just point this out: You can't just extend the space with flash memory; you require an externally powered external hard drive (though "some" of the Y-splitter ones will work). Which is part of my: Why not just put a HDD bay inside of this thing? @FDS: That's what we've been saying. As it currently stands though, and given thing hits shelves in a couple days, they're going to have to let the various news outlets report on that snippet of info for them cos they're not going to be able to re-box them in time.

Don't ask me, though I swear I've seen her before, maybe back in the Demons Run episode(one with Amy's baby). Keep in mind that what's shown on TV is only a handful of his adventures, they do have nice trips out. And he's with River Song much more than depicted It's covered well in the Power of Three episode where they just go off and away for about 7 weeks during the party. The Doctor himself has aged about 300 years since he regenerated from 10th. That's many centuries to meet up with these guys. He knew Nefertiti and the hunter dude pretty well before taking them on-board the space ship.

http://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-sources-their-book-scanner/ Google have open sourced their book scanner design. So if you've $1,500 of supplies lying about you could easily digitise your library of books.

(I'll edit as we go along)

@FredChoppin: The difference between a HDD's unformatted advertised space, and formatted OS-reported space is about 7%. @Excel: Sure grabbing full versions of ME Trilogy, probably unlikely(even so on the 32GB version, don't forget when Sony were doing 40GB consoles they weren't selling full retail games). But grabbing DLC, including potentially any day one DLC that 3rd party may have planned, it's going to get hard when you've less than half the expected space. @:Atomsk: I did say most not all. As for transferring SD card Wii stuff over to Wii U apparently that will be possible. DVD is a pretty standard size, it's blasted in big huge letters "4.7GB" across them so folks will have a pretty good idea of disc capacity. As noted by Ethan and others there's an expectation that the amount on the box isn't going to be 100% that which is actually in the device, but it's within the aforementioned 7% or so. btw on the auto-shut down thing: That while it's downloading too? I've been grabbing PSN+ stuff last few days and it'd get annoying fast if I couldn't leave it to do it's thing for a hours at a time.

Yeah Random battles in JRPGs generally reduce the want to go exploring. Most of my "let's go randomly exploring" memories are from WRPGs with enemies out in the open which you can choose to avoid.

Well it's not over for another 3 days/2 weeks so of course there isn't any of the owners complaining because there are no owners yet. As I said, give it time, we'll see at least in the UK how ASA deal with it. And you kinda underrate how much people know about stuff these days. Flash drives, hard drives, SD cards, phone storage, etc are pretty ubiquitous these days. They know what 8GB is. And also up to now they only reason we're getting word that the Wii U has 4.2GB gone at launch is because of gaming sites reporting on info given in a Japanese video. This is not something listed on any of the product listing pages, in adverts for the console, and the official page just says "(A section of the internal memory is reserved for system data.)". So I doubt folks will know they're going to have to boost the advertised capacity with external drives if they're actually wanting to use the 8GBs listed on the box. I'm not sure if they've officially said anything(googling finds nothing except you can't store games on flash memory on the Wii U), but I'm to understand with the Wii SD cards don't work on other Wiis should yours fail. So I wouldn't hold my breath. p.s You can back-up (most) of your PS3 to an external hard drive should your console fail.

Chew:

You can plug your the HDD from your RROD console into an Arcade. And also buy the MS certified (and profited from) HDD. Hence my confusion at having the small space, and not having a "Nintendo Drive" or whatever as an option. Having to get an external hard drive in order to participate in the new features the console provides is bit silly (and a stop-gap solution) and really just kinda enforces that Nintendo really aren't thinking long and hard about their whole internet side of things on the Wii U. And I don't doubt they'll be releasing bigger spaces over time (And I wouldn't be surprised on a Wii U XL or something that has a HDD bay in it for people who maybe want to join the 7th generation). I do doubt they'll be re-labelling the boxes to say "3GB Wii U" though. But they really should. (p.s as a side note MS are being sued over the fact the MS Surface 32GB loses half it's advertised space before you've even got to it, so keep eyes peeled) edit: Yeah in case it's not completely coming through, as Ethan has said the 60% of advertised space is gone in a flash is the really big part of this. Starting out at 8GB and not having a HDD in this day n age is a secondary concern.

Well I own the 40GB version of the PS3 so you can kinda figure which I'd go for (though it's now a 320GB version, cos it's a device that supports replaceable hard drives...which at least would be a reasonable balance with the Wii U). And really it doesn't matter which version I would purchase (I'm in the "definitely not buying" column anyway), it's still insanely shitty that the version sold as 8GB has less than 40% of that as usable space and all it will do is hamper any future digital sales they try to push, or fuck up purchasers of third party titles with day one DLC. 3GB in this day and age just doesn't cut it and it certainly won't over the next 5+.