fuchikoma

Well, I bet it still handles the soft power button on the PC case like XP and Win7 do... but it really sounds like they've made a lot of terrible decisions with this one. Still, that's par for the course - MS makes an innovative release when everyone's pretty comfortable with what they have; a lot of the innovations turn out to be horrible and they collect feedback and flames from the users, then they release a more conservative version with many issues fixed.

There was once concern over Apple disallowing apps that redundantly copied functionality that was bundled with iOS, but they allow other browsers like Opera, Skyfire or Ghostery.

Hit or miss companies you say...

I'm using a Logitech F310 - like a wired DualShock 3, no tilt, no rumble. Analog triggers are flat, but stiffer than the Sony ones so they feel more finely controllable. Great d-pad, just like the Logitech RumblePad II I used to use. Before these, I'd use Saitek pads, but I really prefer Logitech now. If I had the choice at the time, I'd probably have gone with the F510 since it has dual vibration feedback, though TBH I haven't encountered any PC games with nearly the nuance there that I'm used to in consoles. Mostly buzz vs not-buzz. Oh, and these new pads have a switch to toggle DirectInput (typical Windows games) and XInput (new games that want a 360 controller.)

It might have been something like that for me too! I was really under-impressed with RR1 PSX, apart from the fact you could load the game, swap in a music CD and keep playing... R4 really hit it though! IMO it was the peak of the series. RR5 was... bizarre. I never got the hang of that weird handling. 7 and the PSP games were fun, but from there on it was drifting on rails. Yeah! I used to make heavy-bass discs for a friend who was really into car and home audio (he didn't do it the pro way, but some achievements include melting speaker wires and dimming the lights in his pickup truck, heh...) I put the PSX Forest Law theme on one and it was explosive... (Also, my mistake - all five soundtracks. Arcade, PSX, Techno Maniax, Seven Remixes, and I just discovered Tekken 3 Battle Trax. Wow, they sure went crazy with this one!)

I love some late 90s Namco soundtracks... Most of the Ridge Racers, especially R4. All 3 versions of the Tekken 3 OST are great too. Anyone know what was up with them musically in that era?

"Mr Withers, 48, from Reading, Berks, holds himself personally responsible for the decline because he took his eye off his UK business while he was opening up 700 shops across the globe." Reading, Berks...

It's been speculated there is one in the iPhone, but not the desktop OS. Google has used one to remove malware from Android devices and Amazon has used one to pull purchased books with questionable licensing from Kindles, but so far it's not been an option on desktops that I know of.

This is old news, but I didn't see it in here - In Windows 8, according to plan, MS will be able to revoke your apps remotely if they see the need. I'm very uncool with this on a desktop computer, and while I bet it'll be stoppable by simply disabling a service (if administrator privileges are sufficient to do so!) being able to hack your way around a restriction doesn't make the restriction ok.

Awesome. Now I have to share the most epic automatic Mario level I have ever seen... Part 1 Part 2 BTW... While you have to reset your settings on a Vita to download or play Japanese games, you can still do it, install the NicoNicoVideo app, then reset back to English and it will still work! (However, many videos are flagged as unavailable in the app anyway.)

Once in a while you just find a song that just fits...

No, there's nothing that lets it play them straight "out of the box." As I understand it, you can still read the disc, but like DVDs, there's not any built-in player that can handle the decryption, demuxing, etc. (The actual codecs I think are actually quite accessible since they are the same ones used for most video now...) There's also a whole heap of headaches caused by HDCP protection - so you might have a 1080p monitor or better, and a 1080p Blu-Ray, but your video card and/or monitor isn't fully HDCP compliant, so you're limited to... 1080i (? or 720p?) or maybe just get a playback error. The joys of DRM...

By "like that" do you mean locking out the ability to read the discs? It's more like the lack of DVD playback they're discussing, but not quite since it's not removing a feature that used to be there. You could get a BD drive for a Windows PC and read discs/play movies for about as long as they've existed.

Yeah, sorta lame at first, but it makes sense for licensing and realistically, I'd probably just throw on ffdshow and Media Player Classic - it's not like they're going to lock out the ability to read discs or something. Kind of strange though for a consumer... it's like getting a Blu-Ray player and finding out it can't do audio CDs. "What the? It can't even... Never mind, I have a half dozen other things that'll do the job..."

True. The Internet was dawning, most media had become practical and cheap in digital, not analog formats, and the governments of the Western world were still pretty pre-Orwellian. Great era. Which OAV was that one from? The way the singer moves in that video always reminded me of Trent Reznor... though I guess the video itself is a bit like "Closer" by NIN, with the dark, dusty, randomly eclectic theme... Here's one from the English Street Fighter: The Motion Picture anime. "Ultra" by KMFDM: and while we're on the 90s nostalgia thing, here's the original ADV Films trailer. I heard this a million times in high school...

Wow, HH. You're taking me back to the mid-90s here! First Superunknown, now Smash? And LittlePirate - that last song you posted fits mini-Deadpool dancing TOO well...

The Smackdown WWF/WWE wrestling games worked like that... Well, at least in 2 and 3. You'd lock onto an opponent and then use directions to move, but also as a move choice modifier. Personally, I still like the risk/reward thing of more complicated inputs, but that is a common complaint. I actually miss some of the crazy SNK inputs like back, half circle back, forward, punch.

Most importantly... combos go up to 5 hits. No infinites. This is what took me out of fighting games for years because it's just not fun. Priority no. 1 would be to make a game where both players are always engaging each other dynamically - not trying to lock the other guy into paralysis while you drain his HP by inputting a memorized string of moves. After that, I'm not that adamant about it, so I'm kinda just brainstorming... 4 attack buttons, like BB. IMO, middle punch and middle kick are taking it too far. 2D, with sidestepping or rolling evasion moves like... KoF '94? DoA-style reversals? A+B to sidestep, A+B+Fwd to roll, A+B+Back to reverse an attack? Air to air, air to ground and ground to air (down+throw) throws. n vs n combat. Like tag teams in the Capcom vs SNK games, but if the roster is 30 fighters, you could go up to 30 v 30... if you wanted to. Maybe some kind of ratio system for stronger fighters - but ideally (magically?) there wouldn't be super guys and weak guys, just different styles. I'd recommend against putting in more than a few guys for this, but hey, if the program can do it and the players feel like it... Same basic SNK/Capcom special moves - QC, HC, DP. Personally, I'd rather not have any hold to charge moves, but if it lends variety... whatever. Strong versions of all special moves doable by repeating the directional inputs (you know, QCF QCF + P) - like normal attacks, it'd be slower, but more damaging - but not devastating. "Ultra" moves wouldn't be on auto-pilot. Not sure what system to adopt. Slap Happy Rhythm Busters? Anyone know what I'm talking about? Maybe something more like some of the Naruto fighting games where you have a stack of QTE buttons to run through as fast as you can, and the opponent can do likewise to mitigate it? Don't know - some kind of quick minigame to modify the damage and flashiness anyhow... A strong single player mode is a must. The boss would not be able to "cheat." No supermassive hitboxes, loads of invulnerability frames, moves that suck you in, teleports, mega high HP, unblockables, etc - just a maddening bastard of a skillful AI, so you know for sure if you were a bit better than him, you'd win - not "if you were 10x better than him you might stand a chance." After unlocking him/her/it, you should be able to play exactly like the AI does in theory, but skill levels equal, the character shouldn't give you much advantage. Maybe just high mobility, hard to read moves, etc. RPG mode - continuous scrolling level, maybe stairs/ladders/elevators to branch paths. Also, monsters should be unlockable, like Tobal (2? Both? I forget...) This mode is where the deeper background info on the fighters would be hidden too - talk to NPCs, find clues, etc. Unlock moves in RPG mode to assign to a custom-made fighter you can use in regular modes, or the RPG. Ultimately, choose from any moves the regular roster can do, and then some. Wide variety of parts to build your fighter with, or if all else fails, a sprite editor. This could be a bad idea, but I'll throw it out there: Hitboxes have to fit the drawn sprites pretty closely, and with increasing hitbox size, speed decreases and damage increases? Obviously this would have to be capped on upper and lower bounds, or you'd get super fast unhittable little guys or giants who only need to hit you twice...

Please accept this cheque for $33,000, post-dated for March 3, 3003.

Not sure where that came from to be honest... maybe fooling around with haiku a lot? In grade 7 we had to do a unit on poetry in Language Arts class and I themed each assignment on how poetry sucks. Got good marks for it though, "and from then, I swore never to use my powers for good" or something like that... But really, fitting words into a mold of syllables and beats comes naturally, I just have to take a second to get into it. So just pour that resin into a cup then drop in a stick and stir that shit up layer sheets of CF right up to the top carbon fiber that is: that's called "wet lay-up..." DeStorm has me inspired now... I wanna write raps about the most mundane things I can think of to balance out all the raps about exciting stuff. Buying shoes, mowing lawns, etc...

Wow. If you have a big subwoofer or some badass headphones, that song takes advantage of them... Those are some strong subsonics! I was always partial to Vladivostok FM, though I also listened to a lot of Beat and Massive B on missions, and Electro Choc when ripping around on sportbikes and exotics. I'd switch to Tuff Gong when Lil' Jacob got in the car too, haha... Really theme-based with my music choices in that game.

When I was little, every liquor store in Alberta was run by the government. They were these bland, dark brick buildings with plain lettering, and the teller would sit in a booth with an impact resistant window to deter robberies. I believe it worked pretty well. Like most things though, it was privatized in my lifetime. Now... there's more than healthy competition there because the product is booze. No problem finding willing players there. Electric and gas utilities were privatized, but as Battra92 suggested, that left a monopoly. There's a great amount of discontent now as utility prices have skyrocketed and people have literally died from it (think I linked to that before,) but since there's no alternative, people pay what they ask. The provincial phone service, AGT was privatized when I was a kid too - they became Telus which... well... marches in lockstep with the other telecom oligarchs to charge rates for basic service that anyone south of the border would balk at and probably assume they were joking. Only recently have I heard rumors that people can now get a phone on contract for less than three years - locked, of course - you don't get unlocked handsets. I think now you can pay another $60 or something after your contract is up and you've fully paid off the phone to have it unlocked. I'm not sure why all the defense of monopolies here; I know that it's not monopoly itself that's the issue, but anticompetitive practices - I didn't expect my comment to be dissected for one careless sentence, but over here it's no secret that data providers collude to keep prices high and competition locked out (which strict foreign ownership rules help to ensure it stays that way. Any Cdn startups would just be buying time on the big three's networks anyway so competition is just subletting from the big three, who may throttle the little guys' connections to make them less competitive - actually that's just a Bell thing.) While we have great health and safety regs here, "consumer protection" largely means that the law will be set up to protect large corporations from angry consumers. Actually, our greatest tool in telecoms regulation lately is a grassroots movement that starts Internet petitions. They rose to fame when the big three decided to employ usage-based billing for Internet connections and after drawing hundreds of thousands of signatures and gaining the prime minister's attention... it was decided that per-gigabyte Internet bills were better charged to smaller ISPs instead of directly to consumers, but the practice was still ok despite the public resistance to it. Still, at the hearings it was almost funny how badly they failed to show that there was any congestion issue, that heavy use was costing them more, or how they didn't already have more than enough money to keep their systems fit for a larger, heavier userbase.

Maybe so, but this is an infamous case of a few companies doing everything they can to prevent further competition and charging more for less while making more profits than the vast majority of other providers worldwide. Though I didn't intend to start a political discussion - this is just a basic picture of how the TV companies here work. Bell, Rogers and Telus carry most of the national mass media and data lines in any format because they own most of all of them.

Virgin seems like a cool brand, though their exposure is more limited in Canada... I remember they published 7th Guest back when they dabbled with software. We actually have Virgin Mobile for phones here... except we don't! It's really Bell Mobility - just a vanity label to make it look like we have competition. TV also shows the lack of media competition... In the West, we have Shaw, cable and satellite TV - also a cable Internet and landline VOIP provider. Bell, a cellular phone, satellite TV and Internet provider that does cable TV and landline phones in the East, and Telus, a landline phone, cellular phone, dialup and ADSL Internet, fiber-optic cable and satellite TV provider. Out East, they also have Rogers cable TV instead of Shaw, and cable Internet, but here it's mostly just cellular phones. Quebec is sorta different from other provinces in many ways and they often use Videotron, which is no better than the rest. (Also, Shaw, Rogers and Bell own groups of TV channels of their own, and at least some of them publish magazines too...) And... those guys pretty much run the whole show here, for whatever kind of data service you want to buy. If you want to stick it to them and go with an alternative mobile phone carrier, you can choose Fido, Koodo, Solo or Virgin Mobile, which are all just brands run by the giants. There are small players available in certain places, but they are generally buying usage of the infrastructure laid by the top 3-4 companies which lobby very hard to keep foreign competition from breaking the price collusion they've all locked into - making them the most profitable phone carriers in the developed world and some of the very biggest companies in Canada, among other things. For those thinking "aren't monopolies illegal?" Yes! But this is an oligopoly, and that's all fine as long as our regulatory body has former big telecom execs deciding the rules their former (and sometimes future) employers have to follow.

80 Pages! Frightening... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgCmFkPdufc Youtube's funny. I thought I was gonna post UZU-MAKI by KOTOKO, but instead I posted Raven by DAI, from the movie Uzumaki... (FWIW, I read several chapters of Uzumaki... it was painfully silly, but didn't realize it. The whole town is being consumed... by cursed spirals. )