fuchikoma

It's an older clip, but I just saw it in a compilation and it cracked me up again. It seems to get funnier the more I see... like why did he have to throw a dictionary backwards while vaulting? I think that's what got him... and that second chair is the unsung hero of this clip - it blocked his leap at first, then flipped all the way around and might have landed on its feet if not for the 2nd guy rushing in...

I think they did a fine job with touch menus too. It's too early to say which I prefer - lately I'm using the cursor just because I finally can, but for finding an icon it's as good as an iPhone or Android... Mainly though, it's on-screen keyboards where I think it really shines. No more scrolling to each letter and clicking it! It's like plugging a keyboard into my PS3/360, but more convenient! For stuff like movie playback... I'm totally using buttons to pause, fast forward and rewind. It's also kinda nice that I can pop up the hold-PS menu and take the brightness down without changing grip when playing now, though I'd say it's equal (wow!) to a little less easy than touching the slider directly. Microphones though... I've heard you can use it for team chat in some Vita games, and that's pretty awesome. Mainly though, if a handheld game requires me to yell, sing or blow on it, it's already failed. Sadly, that takes Tearaway off my list because it's not even portable (aside from being by MM... sorry, but LBP was a big failure for me.) It looks positively brilliant creatively, and as something to show off the system's features (and probably to a different age group,) but using LBP as a base of comparison, I think I'll stay away from it.

Ethan: I could see adding a page function to the right stick - it seems unused yet. Strangelove: I have to admit, I'm almost in that camp. Touchscreen only loses marks for me on a handheld because it's really clunky holding it like a controller, then letting go to fiddle with the screen, then going back to the buttons. It's worse though when the most intuitive thing would just be to press X or use the d-pad, but it's unimplemented so I have to switch to the screen and pretend it's an iPhone or something. I also haven't seen a game that really benefits from it yet on Vita - I've had a lot of fun with Unit 13, but the touch controls take away from it, especially when I want to aim a bit left, but it puts the "jump over cover" button right next to the thumbstick, so aiming left without extreme caution is suicide. It also detracts a lot from Gravity Rush, IMO - I almost never "dodge" because I'm busy actually dodging, and only tap the screen to finish bosses because it's the only way. I have a stack of Vita games now plus some downloads, but the effect of touch controls is either neutral or a bit bad (like Hustle Kings, where it makes it much harder to pull off an accurate shot.) Though my take on the last gen was that the PSP was an awesome hybrid of GBA form factor and PS2 graphics/sound, and the DS was home to a lot of games that could have been better without forced touch gimmicks. I know that wasn't the overall market take on it, but ideally a great system to me would have a nice screen and processors, controls about like a DualShock 2/3, and specifically no microphone, camera, motion sensor or touchscreen. (Back touch? I've only seen it make games clumsier so far, and cause gameplay hitches, but I think it has potential somewhere...)

So... the way they implemented d-pad & button controls in the menus is pretty much exactly how I'd have done it. I'm kind of surprised how quick it is when you want to scroll across multiple icon screens. I thought it felt conspicuously crippled at first, especially not having them in the movie player, but now that they've made the effort to include it, it seems bang-on to me. Any rough spots or unsupported parts that stand out to you guys? (It's not on the lock screen, but that'd be kind of slow anyway...)

Gaah... For a spider that size, I'd say forget the bug spray - grab a shotgun! I don't mind if stuff like this is used for advertising because it's neat anyway...

Yes, and the icon stays after you eject the game. When you reinsert it... I think the icon jumps for a few seconds.

The easiest way I've found to transfer screenshots is just to plug the Vita into the PC with Content Manager Assistant running, then open Photos on the Vita, and select "copy."

You may find that sometimes when you take a wallpaper for a PC desktop or other non-Vita device, put it on the Vita, and use it, the resizing is kind of crappy. There's a fix though - just view the same picture in the Photo app, size it how you like, and take a screenshot with PS+Start. Now you have a smoothly-resized wallpaper version.

1.6b GBP ~= 2.5b USD

I've been pretty lucky overall - no multi-vehicle collisions. A couple years ago, I was driving on a suburban crescent with the perfectly worst possible slush on the ground - about 3-4" thick, and sort of a thick, greasy consistency with no chunks of ice - just a paste. Anyway, enough excuses... I'd killed traction control on my car because it was causing it to limp along at walking pace and hold up traffic and as I went into the curve, I fishtailed back and forth 3 times, running wide. Riding the brakes, I rammed my car into a tree at about 2 MPH, but still managed to do about $16,000 (!!!) in damage to it. (No structural damage. Crimped hood, cracked headlight, cracked radiator line, split bumper, which contained foglights, some other misc damage front of the engine, and blown steering wheel airbag.) My auto insurance is through State Farm Canada, because my first vehicle was a motorcycle and they're famously good to bikers. They heard the claim, signed off on it, minus the $1000 deductible on my policy, and that was it. No questions asked, no rate hikes to follow. I'd had my bike around 3 years with them, and the car for just over 1 year, but was over 25 when it happened.

Yes and no. It also had all the DLC characters from CS, so with their crazy high DLC prices, you could look at it as $40 - $8 - $8 - $8 = $16 base cost to get it on a new platform, plus the cost of the characters. Personally for me, a new character is worth way more than a system version update since it gives whole new ways to experience the game, while the latter is kind of a hypothetical thing for high level play that doesn't really change the look, sound, or for the most part, the feel of it. ...it's also not clear at all, whatsoever that CS2 would play like CS patched, looking at it in a store. In fact, I think they gave it that name to give the exact opposite impression.

So they set them in monotone and crushed any shading flat... It does seem consistent with the switch from Aero to Metro, but the result looks strictly utilitarian. It'll be cheaper to print, but aesthetics seem to be an afterthought.

CT PSP, CS PS3, CS II 3DS, CSE Vita

I think they're a little too prolific, personally... I'd still call BB the best fighting game series I've played in many years, but I have 4 of them now, and every time I buy one, it seems like in a week a new one comes out and makes it obsolete. I just can't justify getting any more; I feel like a sucker for getting so many already.

What I'm saying is I wonder how the Android Market must be doing it... either they're sending a blacklist to devices to tell them to remove things, or querying devices to see what's on them and telling them to remove content, or keeping a list of what's installed on everyone's device in the first place. If you read the article I linked, this isn't a convenience feature to allow users to remotely install - it's a backdoor allowing Google to remove potentially harmful apps from devices.

I'm in a hard place now... I'm deeply entrenched in iOS, and politcs aside, I'd handily pick it over the alternatives. I could also really use an upgrade since I'm using an iPhone 3GS that's getting long in tooth and short in battery. Still, this really doesn't endear Apple to me as a customer. Really, I want their attempt here to crash and burn and don't want to support them in it whatsoever. I think a lot of the design patents are BS that is so fundamental it would be unreasonable not to allow any company to use the designs. There were some similarities in icons and layout, but then iOS itself looks very close to PalmOS to me anyway (which basically just uses an icon grid like MacOS, Windows, OS/2, Workbench, QNX and damn near any other vaguely modern GUI.) The most damning similarity I saw was that Samsung used a dock bar, but that could be as basic these days as a status bar at top with time, battery and signal strength.

This sounds like a bit more than that?