Thursday Next

I have an issue with the state "punishing" an individual. Imprisonment is not about punishment (or rather it's not just about punishment. It's about protecting the public from criminals until they are rehabilitated. You've got to look at the kid and ask, "Is this something that is going to happen again?" Some cases, say where a guy is going bankrupt, his kid's terminally ill and he catches his wife in bed with someone and kills them both. You can look at that and say, this was a man under duress, who was pushed beyond his breaking point. Chances are, he won't do something like this again. So you lock him away, assess him over a period of years, give him the counselling he needs etc, and then, when he's back on an even keel, you cut him loose. This kid, well, if he's gonna snap over something tiny, you need to look a lot more closely at why he snapped. Could be that he will never be stable enough to release into society, so you keep him locked away, treat him (medically) as best you can, and try to make him a productive member of the prison population until the day he dies.

Watched the first couple of seasons religiously, then lost touch with the series. It's totally awesome though, can't wait to go through it all again.

With any luck it'll be patched/free dlc'd in.

Alice Madness Returns Shadows of the Damned Infamous (good playthrough) Need to finish Dead Space and play Dead Space 2 and then Infamous 2 and Demon's Souls all before BF3 launches and claims my soul...

I think people sometimes confuse apathy with hatred. Any time anyone "hates" an entirely optional feature, be it Portal 2 hats or cross game chat, I wonder if they are really that offended or if they just don't know how to express that they are neither for nor against it.

So, played a fair bit of Shadows now, and here's an interesting point that I'm seeing raised here and there. How is this different to DNF? There's graphic violence and dick jokes in spades. There's also a degree of violence with sexual overtones, and undertones, in fact, there's a whole orchestra of it. Somehow it doesn't come across as offensive to me in the same way that the DNF content did, but why? Is it because the game is better than DNF so I'm giving it a free pass? Is it because SotD seems to be more self aware? Perhaps it's because Garcia Fucking Hotspur is as appalled by the violence inflicted on his "angel" as I am, while Duke seems not to give a crap? I'm inclined (or maybe I'd just like) to think it's the latter. Duke is callous and unfeeling, while Garcia Fucking Hotspur is passionate about putting a stop to the horror.

Especially for you here's the haiku version. It's 17 entire syllables long so hopefully you brought a cup of coffee to help you through, oh and excuse the line break here, I know it technically makes this two paragraphs. "This" is not a post. Kotaku's report was poor. It needed more depth.

I guess everything does look a little less flat with tesselation stuff. Didn't notice the reflection before, cheers for the tip.

POM was the only one that looked like a marked improvement to me, I may not know what I'm looking for though. SSDO / SSAO looked like they had the brightness set at different levels, if anything I preferred "Off" on that one as I could see more.

Got Infamous 2 (well played Sony, sucker me in with your freebies so I buy the new release...) and Shadows of the Damned. Still need to finish my "Good" playthrough of Infamous, and Alice. Too many gorram games.

It's not had much marketing support... Pity really as I'm rather enjoying it. It's totally over the top, but it's a lot of fun.

Jesus fucking christ. Why are you people so harsh towards Kotaku? The article came from the angle that "he's never seen it though it is possible." It was more so wondering that why after all of these years this is the first time it's been shown in a development version. Also, why do you write multiple paragraphs every single post? Ummm... I write paragraphs for posts because my thoughts can't be summed up by posting "^^^THIS!^^^". Paragraphs are a useful tool for separating out one point from another so that if someone takes issue with any one thing I said they are easily able to reference it, without it necessarily negating the entire post. It's probably a lawyer thing. I like all my points to be severable, rather than having an entire argument fall down because one paragraph was based on a misconception. The reason this article annoyed me was firstly, that having been invited to take a look at a game the editor just rambled on about a feature that is just a result of the game being in development. It's an insult to the developer and implies that the game was so unimpressive that the editor would rather talk about the décor in the booth than the game itself. Secondly, talking about how "amazing" this connection is is as pointless as it is retarded. It'd be like going to see BF3 being developed and writing an article about how with Clipping turned off you could walk through walls and acting like it would be amazing if this was a feature in the game. As I explained above. Anyone with even a flimsy grasp of online gaming and logic would understand that dedicated servers are run on PC's not Xboxes or PS3s. So if Xbox can connect to a PC based server, and PS3 can connect to a PC based server that an artificial separation is in effect. Had the article been a fleshed out discussion of why the two are not allowed to interact, highlighting the cross platform titles like Shadow Run, Portal 2 and (allegedly) FFXI and the potential impact of the two environments meshing together (how would friend lists work etc.) and looking to the future with comments from EA honchos like Gibeau and Riccitiello about making games a cross platform service with Origin rather than selling a disc in a box then it would have been an interesting piece. As it stands it was the usual lazy slapdash reporting that we always see on Kotaku. Finally, as RockyRan points out. Herein I bitch about Kotaku.

Haha... yeah... the PR department are normally the ones that are out there posting loaded guns to 12 year olds telling them to shoot anyone who gets between them and an EA title. The much maligned legal department are the ones charged with apologising to the local police force (http://www.metro.co.uk/news/296342-outrage-over-mercenaries-petrol-stunt) asking for our stuff back (http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/gaming/news/a152508/ea-recalls-promotional-knuckledusters.html) and general clearing up after PR have offended everyone within range (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2794-An-Open-Letter-to-EA-Marketing).

Hahaha... Brilliant.

When a certain publisher talked to both first parties about sharing stats across platforms so that you could have a persistent soldier across PC, Xbox and PS3 Microsoft were very quick to say that they are ok with importing PC data but not exporting any data and would have absolutely no sharing with PS3 data. This obviously doesn't work because if you were playing a game called... umm Field of Battle 3... and ranked up to Master Sergeant on PC with all the upgrades that come with that rank, then imported your data to the Xbox so that you could pick up where you left off then got some more unlocks, you could not push those back out to your PC soldier. Sony were much more open to the idea, however the publisher didn't get the chance to pursue this with Sony as MS had already shut the concept down. Note that this is only sharing stats / a persistent soldier between platforms, not even playing with others. We'll get there in the end, but it's MS that is really choking innovation in interconnectivity at the moment.

I always think of it as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slag_(slang)

Got another one of their retarded emailed articles today: "I've seen an Xbox and a PS3 playing together you won't." Seriously? Was he that surprised that the games play together? Does he even know how servers and clients work? Every Battlefield title has a few lines of code that tells it whether to report to PS3, PC or Xbox servers. That's the only thing that fragments a community, we could turn it off tomorrow if the first parties let us. It's even been done in the past, Shadowrun had cross platform play between PC and Xbox and Portal 2 has cross platform play between PS3 and PC. Now anyone with half a brain could work out that if the PS3 can work with the PC and the Xbox can work with the PC then guess what! The PS3 can work with the Xbox. The only reason that it's not done is because either Sony, MS or both don't allow it. I can understand the reasons why. If one console consistently beat the other it would be a PR disaster. MS stands to lose more if the experience is the same. If they can play against someone without a LIVE subscription and have the same experience then it becomes much harder for MS to justify that ~£40 per year.

You know who LOVES Hitman? Gamespot, that's who. Best PS3 Game - Hitman Best 360 Game - Hitman Best PC Game- Hitman Best of Show - Hitman There was no "Best Wii Game" category, presumably because Hitman is not coming to the Wii... From their brief description of the demo they played: "now there are more cinematic moments" "Absolution, on the other hand, has you on the run" "From the blaring, Inception-style music that opened the demo, to the blinding searchlights of the helicopter Agent 47 was so frantically trying to outrun on a rainy rooftop, to the tension-riddled final stretch when it seemed like Chicago's entire police force was staring a hole through 47's impromptu disguise" They also criticise the blandness and lack of personality of the previous games. The character is SUPPOSED to be bland and characterless. That's how he blends in to crowds. If he was a zany character who dressed up in a clown suit while murdering people he would be the fucking Joker. He's not. He's Agent 47. Jesus fuck, he doesn't even have a fucking name. GAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!! I don't want to run around on roof tops like Jack Fucking Bauer. I want to disappear into the shadows like Leon or Ghost Dog. I want to play as a faceless, nameless, anonymous assassin.

Hehe... "clarify"...

Doomed to failure. With the scaling rarity of BitCoins this is pretty much a pyramid scheme. The guys who started it were generating a coin every 10 minutes. It's now taking Yante about two days to generate half of one coin. As the scheme scales up you're going to be left with people mining all month to get 0.0000001 BitCoins while the early adopters will be relative millionaires. Secondly, the currency is not guaranteed against anything. Fiat currencies all link back to something tangible or something with real value. The government promises that your money is worth x amount. They back this up with tax revenue. There is nothing (and more importantly no one) to fall back on when the bitcoin market collapses. When the economy collapsed in Germany the government were eventually able to re-establish the economy by exchanging the new undervalued currency with the new one at a controlled rate. They could also enforce this rate at a market level by having banks collect/pay rent and having business pay staff in the new currency at the agreed rate. When bitcoin collapses that's it, like any other pyramid scheme, the winners disappear with the money while the losers are left to pay the price.

What he said. I also used the conditional term "may" like "In the future we may end up living on the moon." Loads of wiggle room to be hd there.

Ahhh. I lost touch post liberation of the jaffas.

Infamous 2 £49.99 on PSN? Nope. £35 in Game instead thanks very much. Also got Alice 2 yesterday. Love the art style. Still in tutorial town though (I barely got 10 minutes in to it).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13771099 My first thought when I saw this... bow-ties are cool.

What is that from?