Thursday Next

I'm missing the part where EA were bragging... Is your vision so clouded by the EA hate that you can't see when someone is complementing a rival service and saying "Our goal is to be better than that." At no point does he say that Origin is better than Steam or that it will kill it. He is saying that EA will "try and do a better version of what someone has previously done" He is " quite optimistic we will differentiate ourselves as a service." And in comparing the situation to MySpace he's simply saying that competition is necessary to improve services.

There's a couple of challenging missions later on. The 3 rare nevi are the biggest challenge combat wise, largely since they are immune to your specials and hit very hard, but they are all doable. I didn't go toe to toe with them. I just did some hit and run attacks and then found a health orb, wash, rinse, repeat.

Hmmm, no. I have not. I shall do. I quite like the franchise figured it would be more of the same. Should probably demo Unit 13 too.

Jeeeeebus. I hope not.

Will most likely be picking up Unit 13 and Resistance Burning Skies this weekend. Just finished Gravity Rush today and while I still have plenty to do with Wipeout, LBP Beta, and Gravity Rush challenges, there's always space for new games.

It's more reminiscent of prohibition imho. The authorities trying to crack down too hard on something that they never had a hope of preventing allowing criminals to prosper from it instead finding a way to make money off it.

That's ridiculous. What if you don't own either of those devices? You get to splash out on a charger too? Foolish fools who foolishly forget to include essential items in the hopes their foolish customers will be fooled into buying one.

If I was in a position where I could pay less tax without breaking the law. I'd do it. It's for the government to implement a proper tax system and for the populous to obey it. If the government don't like people avoiding tax, then they should work to close the loopholes. Jimmy Carr is a comedian, not a tax lawyer. It would be unfair to expect him to know the difference between "legitimate tax planning" and "morally wrong tax avoidance". I also think that the backlash from the public was uncalled for. Let's see everyone who criticised him for paying as little tax as legally possible pay some extra taxes voluntarily. Yeah, didn't think so. Cameron was well out of order commenting on Carr's personal finances. Especially given that he 1. immediately backtracked and said he wouldn't comment on individual cases and 2. Has benefited enormously from his dad's tax avoidance.

I think that's the point. She's a cute, fragile little girl who all the big, burly men want to protect/capture. But she's got this power that makes her really dangerous. She's like a badass adorable http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BadassAdorable or whatever else links to it in TV Tropes. (I'm not gonna start clicking or I'll be trapped forever)

No circle pad is a massive, massive fail on their part. Yes it would have created a degree of divergence, but it would have been worth it to make the thing accessible to third party console developers (who pretty much all live and breathe two analogue sticks). Nintendo have survived up to now on being the only people who make loads of money off their console. I don't think they'll get away with it for another generation. My guess is that Gen4 is going to hurt ninty bad.

Allow me to translate. "We broke the game with Patch 1.0.3 as such it will not be able to tell the difference between someone who bought the game and is playing for the first time and someone who is using a free guest pass so we're going to jury rig this by restricting every new account to the gimped 72hr starter version. However, we've already screwed up too many times already to admit screwing up again, so we're going to dress this up as a feature until we can be arsed to fix it." I work for EA, I know PR bullshit when I read it.

Crazy for cookies?

What's a cookie nutter?

Have you heard the theory that Syrio Forel . No? That's because I just made it up.

This... What is this?

Sounds like Shadow of the Colossus but with more talking. I think you are oversimplifying the game. There's plenty of variety: 1. Story missions. Navigating from point A to B. Fighting lots of small monsters. Fighting a big monster. Fetch quests. Survival against many many monsters. 2. Challenges. Pretty much the above but with a time limit. 3. Hunting the rare Nevi. 4. Finding the people lost in time. 5. Tooling about, talking to people and collecting gems.

wet Adjective: Covered or saturated with water or another liquid. A liquid cannot be covered in itself any more than a solid can be full of itself. Therefore water is not always wet.

Well, I didn't want to say. We do seem to be getting better at it as we go. Which I guess is to be expected. Origin can't seem to decide whether it is global or local though. Amazon have Amazon.de / co.uk / .com etc. They have a clear regional identity. iTunes and Google Play are the other way. The store, the content, the pricing (as far as I can see) are globalised. Origin doesn't identify itself along territories, there is no "Origin EU", "Origin US" etc. There's just Origin. But, the content, pricing and promotions are all localised. So if you see an offer for "Battlefield 10 half price on Origin!" you have no idea if the game is available in your locale or if the price is reduced by half.

Sweden got slapped for allowing the CIA to drag a couple of terror suspects to Egypt. The suspects had nothing to do with terrorism whatsoever. The US are or have been publicly involved in a number of questionable acts. Detaining people at camp x-ray without charge. Water boarding. The aforementioned "extraordinary rendition". I'm not aware of any stories about the UK government kidnapping, torturing or imprisoning people indefinitely without charge. Which I conclude either means that the UK can be trusted not to spirit people away, or they are much better at not getting caught doing it. As I'm an optimist, I believe this is due to the UK government being more trustworthy.

It's not gonna be news to anyone here, but part of it is the problem of not having physical stock. If you have a couple of boxes of a one year old game, you need to shift them so you have room for more new games, so you drop the price till they sell out. With digital goods you can literally forget your back catalogue. I don't think that there are many companies that "get" digital sales really. Google, Amazon, Apple and Valve all seem to. Everyone else is a bit behind.

Any opinions on the whole Assange affair? Can't help but agree with the guy that if he gets whisked away to the US he will never be seen again. He obviously needs to resolve the sexual assault / rape allegations, but I'm not sure why the "questioning in connection with" needs to happen in Sweden when he could just as easily be questioned by Swedish police in a British police station either in person or over a video link. This whole thing (and the similar case of the Asperger's UFO hacker bloke) make me very uncomfortable. In fact, it does kind of make me understand why Americans are so militant about freedom. Perhaps they're right and their government can't be trusted?

It's not illegal to possess it. It's illegal to publish it. Publish in this instance means sell, give, lend or otherwise distribute either physically or digitally. So there's nothing to stop you importing and owning obscene publications.

I know it's a bit "First they came..." but it honestly doesn't bother me. I don't consider it an erosion of my rights that "the government" doesn't let me see or play content which some bloke at the BBFC has deemed obscene. Largely because there is nothing to prevent me from importing such material. I find American's militant defence of FREEDOM!!! mind boggling. Like the much cited (by me) protest ride in New York where, in defiance of (very sensible) laws requiring all motorcyclists to wear a crash helmet, a bunch of motorcyclists rode without helmets through NY. That is, until one of their number went over his handlebars and died as a result of splitting his unprotected head open on the tarmac. At least he died free I guess... Is it just CP or simulated CP by the way?

Pretty similar to UK rules, somewhat unsurprisingly. In the UK the obscene publications act prohibits stuff like that. You're never going to get a rape-game cleared in the UK. Can't honestly say that I think that is a bad thing. I'll be interested to see how the Aussies go about implementing this rule though. I'm not sure when repetition becomes undue. Shooting people is pretty strong and realistic and repetitive as hell. We'll see how Dead Space 3 and others fare I suppose.

Kingdom Hearts Three-Five-Eight over Two. What's so hard to say about that? Kingdom Hearts 179.