Thursday Next

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?

In all honesty, and with an appreciable level of bias, they would have been better off releasing a Duke Nukem skins and audio DLC pack for Bulletstorm. Epic's marketing campaign "Duty Calls" was a better example of a parody of shooters, DNF seems to have no self awareness and is just plain bad.

Oh! I just remembered why I actually hate Amazon. I knew I had a better reason for my boycott. Home Delivery Network. I think the term network is a lie. It is clearly one illiterate bumpkin on a moped with no sense of direction (let alone a map or GPS). Amazon consistently shipped my products on time, but they never arrived until at least a month later, after I had the village idiot responsible for delivery draw a map to my house on cartridge paper with crayons. I asked them once where the driver was. They said he had phoned in to say he couldn't find the address. I said, "Have him call me and I'll direct him." They replied "Our drivers don't have phones on them." Needless to say, I was deeply moved at HDN's policy of hiring those with learning difficulties to operate their vans and call centres. In other news, think I might get inFamous 2 tonight via PSN... provided the price is not toooo extortionate. (I've found I rather like having games on my HDD).

I tend not to buy from Amazon as their prices are similar to other online retailers yet they still charge delivery (well, this really only applies to smaller things like dvd's / blu-rays, the big ticket items it's a fairly level playing field. Normally Play is my go-to for films and Game for well, games (mostly cos of the loyalty points).

I agree with the majority here, I think this part of the game is deeply inappropriate. Rape is often categorised as a de-humanising crime, to class women as no longer human because they have been raped serves only to reinforce this. Going out on more of a limb, (possibly because by this point I was looking for things to be offended by) the implication that the two women who subsequently explode consented ("It was out first time with an alien.") also conjures up some potential inter-racial relationship comparisons. Also, after having an entire level dedicated to tentacle raping women, where the hell do they get off having Duke say "Take your tentacles back to Japan freak."? I find the whole thing somewhat disturbing, I don't watch tentacle rape anime for the same reason. I find it in no way titillating or amusing to see women be raped in any fashion. I get the impression the devs were maybe aiming for H.R. Geiger's modelling of Aliens on the female reproductive system, but they have shot well wide of that mark. This just smacks of a misogynist relishing in "sluts getting what they deserve."

I think the Halo series tends to lean more heavily on its "expanded universe" than any franchise (except maybe StarWars), the stories in Halo are generally rather bland and the gameplay is one dimensional. What makes fans so absorbed in the Halo series seems to me to be all the gaps filled in by the novels, cartoons and so forth...

I liked the sandboxy, go anywhere, do anything feel of it. The content updates were great. Loads of post release free stuff, and a good value expansion in the form of Big Surf Island. Of course, I am biased.

Stuart Lee is a fecking leg-end. Awww... Hotty beat me to Joe Pasquale. Here's Potter instead. Double edit! DAMN YOU HOTTY! Also, Bill Bailey awesomeness. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js4GepPNQro

With regard to Piracy = Theft. It depends very much on where you look at it from. From an objective viewpoint, they are, by definition, different. UK law defines theft as follows (numbers added by me): A person shall be guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates(1) property belonging to another(2) with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it.(3) Taken in parts we see that in Piracy: 1. The material is dishonestly appropriated. You know you are not allowed it, but you took it anyway. 2. The property (albeit intellectual property) does belong to another. 3. While the intention may be to permanently retain it, you cannot deprive someone of something you have copied. So Piracy is not theft. If you take a side on the issue (as most people here seem to have done being either pro or anti). From the Pirate's point of view, they (speaking in broad generalisations, individuals may wish to disagree) see it as a "victimless crime", they have not taken a physical item from a shop shelf, so the company will not run into a situation where it wants to sell a copy, the buyer wants to buy a copy, but a thief has taken that copy so both buyer and seller lose out. From a Publisher's point of view a thief and a pirate are the same. Both have obtained the game illegally, whether it's Piracy or Theft is just semantics.

inFamous (1) on an eeeeeeebil playthrough. Need to go through it again as a goody two shoes. One thing that annoyed me... no, two. 1. When you're done clearing all the side missions before the last boss three areas remain uncleared. Because around this time I had to do a hard reset, (accidentally climbed the wrong building and did a good thing) I thought I had corrupted the save, leading me to replay a couple of hours needlessly. 2. Blast shards. I've got 97 out of 350 to collect. three. hundred. and. fifty. Why the hell are there so many? They could at least have the decency to have them persist on the map once I've pinged them so that now that I am travelling about I could collect ones that I may not have bothered with at the time. Or, perhaps, they could have done that thing that Criterion did where you could amend your save file on their site to find the last few crash gates and jumps.

Yup. You're the only one. Out of ~7 billion people you are utterly unique. I could see your point if this was a new controller for the Wii, which has an established stable of low fidelity party games and some higher quality single player titles, but it's not, it's for an HD console. PS3 and Xbox games such as Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, FIFA, the upcoming Resistance 3, some racing titles, Resi 5 and so forth support local multiplayer. It's bad enough when you do some multiplayer Left 4 Dead and get stiffed with the MadCatz controller with the massive dead zone and spongey triggers, let alone if your buddy has the U controller with all the additional features it brings and you're left painfully clutching a thoroughly unergonomic Wiimote.

Mirror's Edge 2 with Frosbite 2... jump over, slide under, or...

Looks horribad. The video above is proof enough that it should never have come out. I'm not even sure what is supposed to be parody and what is just bad game design.

Not so much different tbh. On 90% of games you're moving around on a 2D plane, so you only need fwd, bkwd, l n r. Apart from space sims n flight sims you're going to be just fine with WASD as you are with a thumbstick. And racing games. Racing games are complete arse on a keyboard. Kind of moot anyway as you have the choice with PC's. Do kind of wish the current gen consoles had had M/KB as a control option in more titles. The only one that springs to mind is Unreal Tournament on PS3.

On the plus side, the U controller will be with every system, so everyone making nintendo games will (probably) support it. Unlike the Kinect and Move, that see sporadic, or superficial support from third parties. On the minus side, unless PS Vita does pretty much what the U controller does then U will be the only system of its kind. Third parties are going to be reluctant to focus on U controller development if it means branching off from their established big consoles. It'll be relegated to an inventory or map screen at best, if it's supported at all. It'll be the usual Nintendo show of lots of well received 1st party titles and bugger all third party support. I can see this one being a GameCube. Technically a good system, just lacking dev support.

I just went through Game because of the loyalty points. I get staff discount there too on account of working for a publisher. Been trying my damnedest to find out about the 3G Vita in the UK, but no-one's saying anything.

That and shoulder charging doors so that they splinter off their hinges rather than just opening.