WTF

Honestly on a personal note I don't mind US versions of British shows because it brings revenue to the UK production co to some extent and the creators and rights holders. it gives jobs to people but unfortunately it can kill a few brain cells here and there. Humour may not translate well but it's better than revisiting shows over and over and making it terrible. This way a show's creator gets it out of their system and it exists as a different entity and they can move onto other projects. If it doesn't believe me, we can see them making the same shit for a much longer period. Also I do like the UK method of making shows have fewer than 13 episodes for syndication. That really needs to change out there.

I agree that's an insane thing. And it also is upto the ISP to bear the whole costs. I'm certain there will be some opposition to this on a fair few fronts. I do agree with curbing piracy on some scale but all current methods are still ridiculous. Also trying to talk to FACT is like talking to a brick wall even if you're a film production company.

OT Note: Funny how most engineers today end up in law, media, finance or investment banking. I'm one of them after all.

Oh don't get me wrong - it's fine on the consumer side (probably) and it probably is sound for Microsoft but Microsoft's bread and butter comes from corporate businesses. In fact consumer division including Xbox only accounts for less than 20% of their revenue. Edit for full disclosure: I do have a vested interest in seeing Microsoft succeed. I know at least 25 people working in middle to senior positions there 4 of whom were classmates. I own some stock in the company (so of course I want to see them profit but I'd like Apple, TWX and GOOG to succeed as well). I have friends who are part of MSDN, paid for by their companies and investment banker friends who are heavily invested in them. And for the record Office365 is actually quite practical in the professional space and is something that I could recommend companies who want to stick with MS Office as for a yearly fee it prevents them from facing the constant upgrades. Also to note: MS has done a lot of things good but they do not have a clear strategy with Windows and it needs to be rectified. Windows 8 could be good for consumers but it currently faces an identity crisis and is not going to be released in this version at least from inside sources. However the version in plan for corporates is significantly eh and lol not all my friends who worked at MS worked on great projects either. One of them was working on Longhorn which we know how it turned out, however he left them for Motorola (Which turned out to be interesting to say the least). I'm just saying what I know based on well their rumblings and this was about a month ago. I can criticise their decisions which don't seem ideal. Also to note: While MS would want to continue on with their Xbox business as it is highly successful they have much more interesting things planned outside of the console space and like they said they could terminate XBLA if they thought it wasn't profitable anymore.

So the game sold 36k across all platforms in the US, deifnitely going to be less than that here and Syndicate tanked to 34k across all platforms (which is worse cause it's on the PC as well...) I'm enjoying Asura's wrath though.

@dean I know why we copy discs onto the drive. The other reason is that it does in fact decrease load times (At least that's why I copy my discs onto the drive) and @excel true but maybe they don't want to pay the licensing fees to the BluRay consortium. Sony probably has some discounts being a member of that group but I doubt MS would have any discounts and they already have most streaming media players for their devices that they could think about forgoing an optical disc media. It's not the first time a company makes an unsound decision and MS does seem to be making a fair few ones including the whole deal with win 8.

There was another AR demo too at GDC. I forgot what was that about but basically magnet and something else were two game implementations that were actually works in progress.

Well we aren't in disagreement then. Outside of that I must say though that outside of all of this the clicking of the 360 sticks bothers me from time to time and it does feel too sharp/harder. I prefer the controllers to be soft but sturdy since I normally have long bursts of gaming sessions. The design mirrored would be fine but the make - there's a lot i would change there. Especially the buttons.

Well you could argue what you like but here's the thing. The article clearly states 1) there will be no disc media 2)there will be some sort of physical media It may be a rumour. But you can't say yes to digital distribution when it clearly states the rumour is that there's no disc media but some other physical media. Of course carts are not ideal but BluRays in mass production are a lot cheaper than £40. Not to mention that it's also going to be cheaper by 2013 when the device will be massproduced. There's differences in prices. By carts they could by proxy include flash drives. It wouldn't be digital distribution and wouldn't require the internet but you could have encrypted flashdrives that store the game information and require to be connected to the machine to be activated. Some firmware/bios link with the xbox could activate it. Of course it can be emulated later but the prime motivation of the next xbox is 1) reduce piracy 2) cull used game sales. Those are the two things they're focussing on. I doubt they'll do purely digital distribution since it's difficult to download huge files for a lot of people. But they could have an authenticity check run and require your device to have firmware updates (which can be downloaded and installed like on the PS3 even if you do not connect your Xbox to the internet). They are not stupid to go purely into DD and yet they do not want to use a disc drive. There's not a lot of possibilities there when it's both physical and not a disc drive. Actually SSDs can be carts too. You could have something like a CF card that usually streams 1080p footage with ease (Those are expensive but there are similar cards too that are cheaper). As is right now, they know that a lot of 360 users 'install' their discs onto the hard drive and so when you think about it in ther terms they know they want a physical drive but a disc isn't necessary. However hard disc space is. A proprietary memory card or a flash cart or ssd or something that both lets you install it onto the hard drive as well as runs from the medium would be what they're looking for. However while these are all rumours, you can't entertain digital distribution speculation to the max when they said they're using a physical medium. That's pretty much ignoring what they said even if it is a rumour considering this is in the article itself --> " Although the console will not include a disc drive, it will offer compatibility with some sort of interchangeable solid-state card storage, although it is not known whether this will be proprietary or a more standard format such as SD. " Plus he's tweeted a fair bit saying the rumour said there will be some physical drive just not discs.

They didn't say there would be no physical media. Just that there would be no discs and that's a big difference. If they said no physical media our discussion makes sense but even the writer of the article on MCV said that it's just they rumour that there would not be a physical disc drive. However if it is the next-gen I'm not sure if we should have cart or SSD or other physical drives replacing an optical drive just yet. It'll not be cheap and considering the 360 works mostly due to the 3rd party presence it's not a smart decision. Plus it means there's always going to be limited number of copies of a game (Take a look at handhelds) and the prices could go up. However anti-piracyyeah that could work. I don't think it'll be a digital console next unless they're just planning to release an XBLA lite console with integrated kinect and a bigger storage drive for isos of games.

actually tiny hands would make sense. Most of my female gamer friends who usually find that the 360 controller hurts their hands have well smaller hands. And I do agree with you Battra, in fact most devs do know the ideal button placements for the game console it's developed on (Though I'll be honest MGS twinsnakes on the gamecube was a pain in the ass to control) The DS3 is symmetrical which makes it easier when it comes to the placement of the sticks. We are mostly hardwired into appreciating symmetry by default for some reason (Though pure symmetry in living beings can sometimes confuse us), it's logical that our bodies function well to symmetry when it tries to adapt to something that's not natural to it. What I'm saying is that if the 360 controller were more left centric as in the sticks were arranged mirrored to what they are now it would be better for lefties. However it's not so the better option would be symmetrical. The accuracy you mentioned works better for those who are righties.

Borderlands, Bioshock, Civ and Duke probably I guess. However for UK folks it's unlikely that Civ will be discounted to £5, since right now it's at £14.99 at 50%, I highly doubt they'd do more than 75% I guess I've to wait till summer sale for the Darkness to drop. BTW for those of you in the UK since Game/Gamestation is having their firesale I'd recommend going there on Saturday or Monday once all the games are marked and labelled (it's not in every store as yet) so that you can have some insane prices. A fair few people have managed Space Marine for £1.98 already. I do feel for those working there. All signs currently point to liquidation. However don't expect any Vita pricedrops there since Sony own the stock of all the HW and games so they can't price it down (unless it's preowned).

My bad, it seems as if they've corrected the article (found yet another article where they criticised the first article I'd read where the author had brought out that similarity). I didn't read the nature one till now to be honest since the newspaper failed to source it (I guess to prove their point perhaps).

Actually it does. If you're left handed and you use the traditional right handed 360 controller you lose the aspect that you generally go with when you're using right-handed objects. Like I said I'm ambidextrous but that's from being forced to use my right hand more or less (they never cared for which way I held a pain but kept insisting I go right) and I have certain issues with symmetry and notice it's fairly common amongst most people I've met who are left-handed and I know a lot of left-handed gamers who coincidentally prefer the PS3 controller to the 360 controller and also possess the stereotypical 'large hands' issue which seems to be the thing that most people complain about when they dislike the dualshock 3. There is no such thing as precision when you go from the lower position to the upper position in general terms. Like i keep beating on several times it's fairly unique to the individual. How it works for you and for some others who you've found it to work is well a group of people as opposed to the general case. I do not find it precise, it feels janked and awkward to me, in fact it also feels janky and awkward to people with small hands and even those who are a bit left-handed. Of course this could be anecdotal but counting the fact that of the 50something people I can think of right now that play both consoles, I can see that all the lefties (of which there are 15) prefer the DS3 and the other is an about even split with some finding both OK as well. edited for misplaced brackets XD

Actually dean if you can bothered to buy it off of Amazon.com Football manager 2012 is about £3.50 http://www.amazon.com/SEGA-40833anager-20121-Football-Download/dp/B005WLRO4M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331228558&sr=8-1 Pretty easy to do it, just need to set delivery address as a US address and it uses your normal card and oh it's steam activated so technically it's better than the steam deal.

Source? It was pretty much on google news so here's a few sources http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/08/tech/innovation/gorilla-genome-evolution/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9130191/Humans-and-gorillas-share-genetic-similarities.html and the original with some references http://www.nature.com/news/gorilla-joins-the-genome-club-1.10185 Hate to really say it but there are some interesting bits on google's news feed if you just hit their news homepage as opposed to their crap RSS feed. There's also the news of the first picture they have of atoms in a molecule. Some university in Ohio captured that.

Your justification Ethan would rely on if you're right-handed or left-handed technically. I think it is entirely possible lefties prefer the PS3 controller. There's also plenty of kids who were forced right too - some become ambidextrous and some well have weird issues.

Not discounted, it's just a week early for Plus users. However I have to say the game is about 2-3 hours long but requires a few playthroughs. The experience depends on yourself, if you're in the mood to chill a bit and the fellow traveller you meet.

So we're currently facing a solar storm. 0600-1000 GMT http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17295337 Honestly it's the biggest in 5 years and we weren't that concerned 5 years ago. If you are in a region where you can see the Northern lights it'll be spectacular tonight (I think only Johnny should be able to see it best to be fair). In other news while the 'drug' isn't the exact issue it seems that we can now definitely connect racism with fear. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9129029/Blood-pressure-drug-reduces-in-built-racism.html They're also finally saying that Gorillas have more genes in common with us than Chimps which honestly makes sense. There's also been research last year that suggests that short people could be missing a few genes (or they're duplicated) is the reason for them being shorter. In a sense it can explain why in a greater number of cases the later children (particularly in families with 3+kids) turns out to be shorter than the earliest ones (this of course depends on both parents ages, older sperm and egg cells aren't always the best but it's not a constant).

Journey is beautiful. Short but it really feels beautiful. A good way to describe it would be the feeling you've had when you were a child and you watched fantasy adventure films except this time you can do it as an adult. Also it's obvious Chen is a film school graduate with his heavy emphasis on show and don't tell. After playing it, I got reminded of Chris Marker's La Jettee in a way (that's a film with audio told through a narrative in stills). I played through a portion of it and ran through other travellers. I could post a review for those interested on tuesday/wednesday. It requires multiple playthroughs for trophies and for the experience. However I will say this, if you were going to play it and not in that mood you probably wouldn't like it. Currently £9.99 and only available for plus users till next week.

PC Mass Effect 3 Ltd Edition DS Advance Wars Wii Trauma Centre: Second Opinion 360 Project Gotham Racing 3 I Am Alive PS3 Journey (almost free actually) Asura's Wrath SF X Tekken

Actually it's not an issue of gamers adapting to the dual shock at all. I hate having things stuck or generally feel glued to the centre of my hand. I prefer materials at the periphery (fingers or if it's the palm above the heart line (that's the one that starts below your little finger/pinky). Maybe it's because I write different to other people (I learnt to paint with a brush before holding a pen and still sculpt and do pottery from time to time). Generally I prefer using my fingers too. It's also probably an issue for people with much longer fingers (when you take the ratio of base to fingers), if it's balance fingers it can go either way but for those with much longer fingers they tend to prefer to grip more things with fingertips rather than the whole hand. I even hold the mouse with the palm in the air in general. It's not an aversion per se but I just dislike contact there when I think about it. Like I've mentioned before, I think the real thing is it's right down to the individual, it's more of what kind of hands you have, the dexterity you possess and other things. Muscle memory plays a role in letting us get used to certain controllers over time. But when it comes to the natural style there's always a preference. For instance I absolutely hated the saturn/megadrive 2 controller but loved the megadrive one controller. They're both basically the same shape and the buttons are actually similarly aligned. It's just one has a much smaller form factor making it hard to press certain buttons exactly if you possessed larger hands. Personally it was annoying during the UMK3 days.