deanb

I have several dozen friends who play TF2 and they have played 374hrs of TF2 the past 2 weeks. I have seve...n friends with Shogun 2. And they have played 153 hours in the past 2 weeks. The game has only been out for one week. WHAT THE FUCK GUYS!!! http://steamcommunity.com//id/deanbmmv/friendsthatplay/34330 (dunno if you guys can access this link) Also I'll give David (shadow) a nudge, see if he's up with joining you guys.

2 things of interest: 1. You've no doubt heard, or a yellow man in your chat box has told you; Steam upgraded their voice codec to Silk, the same codec Skype uses. 2. http://raptr.com/for...6718#post176718 - the new unreleased Raptr client that should get around Steam Guard issues.

This is pretty damn good. He works for Pixar so it's not like he's far from the original works

So no one else chucking this up? http://www.mozilla.c...US/firefox/new/ Firefox 4 is now officially out.

It's been coming for a while now, especially if you've been reading RPS articles. Basically John Walker aka @botherer has now put into motion a campaign to get games, especially digital titles, released simultaneously globally. None of the "Crysis 2 for US today, Crysis 2 for the rest of the world on Friday" stuff we have now. There's plenty to poke holes in on why it's such an outdated system. So there's currently a petition up (from what I can tell might need a bit of tweaking if you're not UK) and he's requesting help from any sites or people up for it. I've thrown in PXOD's weight (hope none of you mind ). I'd recommend anyone else here with access to a games blog to look into it. Maybe anyone with access to publishers too. Personally I think it's a pretty good cause. Being an affected Briton I am a bit biased. Though the arbitrary release dates can affect US too (there's a few games where it comes Friday 1st for us and Tuesday 5th for you guys) Full post can be read here: http://www.rockpaper...-release-dates/ Petition can be signed here http://www.petition....-says-no-oceans (and yes I know "web petitions lead to nothing" but they get the ball rolling, people talking. The right people talking then things can happen.)

I've yet to read a review that doesn't mention "Call of Duty". (maybe it's a common thing, I've not really read FPS review before) I've also only seen a handful that make reference to the fact this is a sequel and there was a preceding game with different story, characters, gameplay, controls and multiplayer. I'd say the obvious guess is most of the folks reviewing have never played the first game, but surely is makes sense to compare and contrast the changes. Reviewers did the same for DA2. It's not like no one bought the first, surely people who've played it would like to know what changes have been made in the following 3-4 years of development and multi-platform release? Also I'm not so sure if I've even read a PC review beyond PC Gamer. I'm wanting confirmation on the basic graphic settings being a pre-release/demo only thing. Though the act that release also brought news that DX11 support is a patch down the line, not supported in the gold release, does suggest that the graphic settings aren't so fancy.

From my understanding you need iTunes to activate and update your various iDevices. While it's possible to do things like transfer music and video without iTunes, that function is still tied to it.

Well you don't really have to mention it since most of the time it's pretty much a given. MS have plenty of cash and as history has shown, they're not afraid to use it. And I'm not actually calling you a retard, you get that right. Just some of your reasoning. Though I'm also working on the basis you don't "mean" them, just throwing them out there.

Yeah I'd guess it's cos most of us don't use have iPods. If you don't have iPod you don't need to use iTunes. And it's generally crap and pushing very close into the same actions as malware, so it's not really worth it. And it's pretty fucked up you even have to use it for iPods n iPhones/iPads still.

Arno: Made comment on selling soul to EA Devil. Get's forum & game ban. After press coverage this ban is later removed. James/Cipher86: MAde poll on women smelling like fish whars. Got a forum and PS3 DLC ban (obviously can't ban you from whole game on console. yet) As far as I know still not resolved. tez19: Insulted other players on forums. Gets forum and game ban. Told to never contact EA again. So there's the case by case stuff. And I think anyone can quite confidently come out and say not one of them should ever have had any of their game access revoked. It once again comes down to the game industry once again thinking it's special. No other industry would you say "BMW have raped the design on the mini, they should burn in hell" and wake up the next day to find a tow truck taking away your car. "Ray Kurzwiel is a lunatic spreading FUD" and poof my bookshelf is short one book. "peter jackson should burn in hell for mainstreaming the hobbit....oh hey LotR won't play anymore.". It just doesn't work like that. Why should games be any different. Why should we ever accept this kind of action? Just because they have the capability to disable your games, doesn't mean they should, doesn't mean they shouldn't threaten it in the EULA, and most definitely doesn't mean they should give the capability to CS. Ban them from the forum if you want. It's a tertiary service to the game. But never ever ever remove their access to their legally paid for games. Ever.

Wait. Have we kinda missed something somewhere? There's multiple guys. Since the initial ban cropped up last week other guys have been creeping out the woodwork. The initial "sold your souls" guy got his overturned, I dunno on the others yet.

Yeah. That's my point.

No this is the DA:O forum/game ban. I split the Autistic bit off separately from the rest of my post.

Just to update this but me and Dave have got press passes now. He's down for the Friday and Saturday and I'm down.... for Firday-Sunday. My bad. We only have a limit of 2 passes per site and the Thursday tickets are now gone afaik, meaning if anyone is interested then there's only the Sunday spot left unless I have a word with the EG guys n see if I can get one of my days taken off. (probably Sunday too)

Global Logo: US logo: Via Thumb Culture

I have some Play4Free codes. Check my profile page. It has 5 uses. Point out in the status update if you've taken one.

The quote is from the guy who applied the ban.

I've stuck with WMP for the longest of times. It worked, it was functional, and the more recent versions run pretty well. However I've been using WinAmp for a few months now as my main player. It syncs up with my Android. At first it was just there for syncing, and I stuck with Spotify (which was my main player the past 2 years or so) but a few months back I re-jigged my music library when I wiped my OS. So Made an effort to clean it up, Which Winamp helped in. Theres still a fair few things I'd change on winamp, mostly in how playlists are shown, but it's good and the wi-fi syncing is fantastic. As long as my phone is within the house I can just right click on a song I want and send it to my phone. I've used Songbird in the past too, really liked the Firefox integration, especially for the add-on and skins system. Used to love this alarm add-on you could get for it. But they recently revamped it. and I'm not so keen. It's pretty huge too. I used Songbird because at the time it was the closest I could find to Amarok, a Linux player that I wa always impressed with when using Linux. I've also messed with MediaMonkey which is meant to have strong tagging features but I wasn't too impressed. WinAmp has been pretty good, but Gracenote likes to label my Japanese songs with Japanese characters. :/ So gonna have to tag those with another program some other date (shame WInamp won't let you move from Gracenote, at least from what I can tell). Oh and it's album art service is shit. Foobar I've lightly touched, wasn't for me. edit: I've heard the Zune software is pretty good, with many asking for it to be the default windows player. Oh yeah one thing I still use WMP for and I find to be pretty nifty, the single use previews brought in with Win 7. Just click a song in the file explorer n it plays in a mini version of WMP.

Yeah I read Cage as writing about experiences and emotions more than the particular situations. I believe he's a parent, so he's probably up with the whole idea of how horrible it would be to lose your kid. He's very big on the auteur approach of game design, one guy leading the pack instead of what seems to be the common approach of collaborative design. I think that in some cases that's the way to go. Also more games need to hire the writer at the start, or provide more incentives for writers to join up in the games industry, instead of just hiring them on at the end to polish some dialogue. Or not hiring them at all Heavy Rain sold "surprisingly well" so it's quite possible we'll see more games like it in the future and more games realising they can go for the 20+ market with games like that than games that have an M rating for gratuitous violence. The more the industry carries on trying to aim for the common denominator, the more they'll lose out on the folks who want a bit more from games. If games want to mature then yeah some games ill have to be for a bit more than just shooting at whatever guys happen to pop out of the building in front of you.

I have a feeling Battra may enjoy this.

Firstly the autistic guy: http://tay.gappoi.or...tistic-cheater/ So I'm not some guy instantly jumping on the big company and standing up for the little guy for the sake of it. (Though don't ask me where I did "call it" but I must of done somewhere. Maybe twitter) The contradiction comes in: Then saying it's not policy to do so and giving the guy access to his games after it gets brought up across a dozen gaming sites. You say CS is heavy handed, but surely if you don't give them the heavy hands to begin with then they can't do this kind of damage. If EA don't intend for a forum ban to also have you lose access to games why put that system in place? Why put any system in place at all that can revoke game access? And if they other infractions were serious enough, why not act then? And if it was based upon other activities, why let it continue to be spread that it was done over as harmless a post as "Have you sold your souls to the EA devil". So yeah, I'd love to make a judgement knowing all the facts, but as it stands EA seem quite happy to let it be known that they can and will remove access to your games and there's no clear guidelines on what will make that happen. So until EA pipe up to say that it wasn't the "have you sold your soul" comment that got him banned from forums and games, then that's the whole facts as they stand now.

I dunno. Wakka and Lulu? There really isn't many couples in games. Oooh, Medic and Heavy. (Because it's also practical)