Thursday Next

Doing my first run in ages where I'm focussed on boarding enemies.Normally I'm all about weapons. It's amazing how much more (how many more?) resources you get by boarding.

I just want to see Batman kick Superman up and down metropolis. I *hate* Superman.

Finally acquired the Crystal Cruiser A and B variant. Man I love this game. Shame there is nothing similar to hop to.

Not sure about your turn of phrase there. "Crapshoot" means "down to luck", not "unfortunate", It's been mixed here. Some thundery showers, some sunshine. How's the driving going? You getting a feel for it? Make sure you do plenty of practice with family and such. It will stress the living hell out of them, but it will do you the world of good.

I'd pop her tart.

I could go for a sequel. Hopefully it will be better for not having to do the hand holding explaining about drifting and the need for two pilots to control jaegers etc etc etc.

Sounds like he wants to (a) Stop a child from accessing porn and (b) get google to stop searches contain "child" and "porn". Which oddly means that if I search google for "How do I stop my child accessing porn" my search would get blocked.

Presumably this is a sequel to Black Hawk Down, where the Somali Militia scrapes together all their pennies to buy a couple of pedalos and raid the White House while the heroic government makes a brave stand while using their billions and billions of dollars to eventually drag themselves to a pitiful stalemate.

I can't stand it when people do internet soapboxing on a game and say "[Company] does not understand [product] fanbase! We don't want [new feature], we want [old feature]!" I don't hate it because they are moaning about change, but because they have appointed themselves spokesperson for an entire fanbase.

Does that technically make it a vote for FFIV? VII will win this anyway. Just change them all to VII and embrace the inevitable.

Glengarry Glen Ross: Great film. The number of people who don't get the Ol' Gill reference in the Simpsons must be staggering. Pacific Rim: Was a decent summer blockbuster, but didn't set my world on fire. Still a good film, but I hoped it would be more.

Yeah, given that they are both parents of established characters, nothing spoilerish there. Which also makes me think that it's not them, as it's not worth hiding. I reckon (not a spoiler unless you google it): The Kindly Man.

I reckon they will continue to do it. Most PS4 users will of course get +, but the vast majority of the Sony market share will be on PS3 still for the next year. If they can drive all those people to + then it'll be a smooth transition to PS4.

Nasa is depressingly small as well.

With regard to Zimmerman one of the key considerations (and I'm assuming that we are all agreed that Martin death was wrongful morally if not legally) in my opinion is this: Is there a real risk that this will happen again? From what I've read for the safety of other people in the neighbourhood Zimmerman should have been locked up. As it stands he has been vindicated for stalking someone which resulted in a altercation leading him to kill someone. What's to stop Zimmerman from doing the exact same thing again? I'm assuming he still has his gun license and now anyone who sees him following is going to be even more likely to react extremely given that they are probably in a life or death situation. For the sake of public safety the guy should have been locked up and psychologically evaluated. He's gonna end up killing again in similar circumstances or get himself killed one of these days.

When you say "got", it makes me wonder if you successfully hunted them.

I think Kickstarter terms are pretty clear, you pays your money you takes your chances. KS keep at arms length as much as possible. If the project fails because your reach exceeded your grasp then you are under no obligation to return any money to your backers. The FAQ is just giving some PR advice. Legally, unless you have been doing something other than using the money to make the project then I don't think a backer would be able to recover their pledge.In the UK bringing a small claim will cost you £25 and going beyond that to actually recover your money you are looking at around £100 - £150, so unless you backed for £100 plus it's not even worth trying to recover your pledge, not that I think you'd succeed anyway. That's why I think what DF are doing sucks so much. Beyond a bit of a dent to their reputation they have taken no risks themselves and have been careless with other people's money. Now, if you are going to be careless with the money of EA, or Activision or some other EvilCorp™ then fine. They're big enough and ugly enough to take care of themselves and can do stuff like sue DF to get at least some of their money back or take control of the IP themselves and finish it. In this instance though, DF have been careless with the money of their biggest, most loyal fans, I'm sure some of those fans considered the backing pledge to be a significant amount of money, but worth it to support a team they believe in. The worst part of it is (to my mind) that having blown past several budgets DF don't even seem slightly apologetic. Instead they seem to be trying to suck in even more cash to throw down their apparently bottomless money pit, so I don't think any lessons are being learned along the way. I can just see this spiralling out of control until it is vastly over budget, massively delayed and has been gutted just to eventually get something out the door. Sadly, it's a ringing endorsement for overbearing, interfering publishers who would have kept a far tighter rein on expenses and ensured that some sort of dev schedule was adhered to.

Yeah, it's pretty much the same as the UK in that respect. Assault is harming or causing someone to fear harm to their person or property, scale goes up from there ABH, GBH etc. Then using a weapon always tacks on the "aggravated" which ups the sentence a fair bit. None of which explains the other guy getting off scott free.

Don't know about classist. I can afford games I just don't have time to play them. Especially when the weather is good. Between working 09:00 to 18:00, and socialising in the evening I've had very little time to play The Last of Us. Working in the games industry makes it very difficult to not have things spoiled. Which brings me to my next point. I don't (with a few exceptions) know what games people like, nor do I know what they are playing now, waiting to play, or want to play when the price drops. By the same token, I don't expect anyone else to know the same about me. As such, the onus is on me to let people know where I am in a given story line before engaging in conversation. Generally it's unusual for people to post plot twists in clear view. I don't see many spoilers revealed over, say, Twitter and forums tend to hide spoilers. It sounds like this bloke wants to talk about what everyone else is talking about, but feels left out because he either has to bail out of discussions before he gets spoiled or he has to accept that he will see plot points before he reaches them. I understand that this makes him feel lonely, especially when he has marked himself out as a critic and so is expected to know what is going on in the latest big thing, but I really don't know what he expects the world to do. I'm pretty sure that I'll be able to find people to talk to about TLoU when I eventually finish it, I know that I still love chatting about ASoIaF even though I read the books twice and have talked about it loads. Going through that journey again with a new person is great, it reinvigorates the story for me.

Might as well chuck in my 2 cents. - The Android ecosystem officially accepts rooting. HTC provide bootloader unlocking on their website http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader With a lot of caveats about how stuff may not work. - As rooting is an accepted practice it is common for apps on the Play store to say "Root Required" or "Will not work on rooted devices." - The Apple ecosystem does not accept rooting as a legitimate practice. Apple's ToS discourages making such changes. - As such, when you root an iOS device you acknowledge that you are going "off piste" so to speak. - To my mind, once you do that all bets are off. Software *should* all work fine. But. If a developer decides that I should sit on the naughty step for breaking the house rules then I personally think it's a fair cop. Not sure how many people bought Deus Ex and have a jailbroken device, but I bet it's a tiny amount. I think it's interesting that they are looking into ways to prevent piracy on mobiles. This experiment didn't pay off, but they've learned from it and we can all move on.

Been there a few times now. Epic terrain. Can't wait to ride it again. If you happen to be in the Longhorn between the 21st January and the 4th February, I'll get the drinks in. On topic: Does anyone know if old PS2 saves will work with the remaster? Doesn't seem likely. Anyone tried it with say Ico or Shadow?

A large publisher would probably say "Here is an advance of $X." They would expect the dev to make the game with that amount. If the game was over budget then the publisher would either say. "This looks like it will be amazing and sell a mega-fuck-tonne we're going to give you some more cash, but we're tightening the reins to make sure you stay on target." or "We've lost confidence in this. Finish it as best you can and we'll try to recoup what we can." Game development costs don't increase exponentially when you localise into a couple of extra languages. If Double Fine had released a $400k game on time no one would have any room to complain. If one billion people had backed Pebble that doesn't mean that Pebble should make diamond encrusted watches because they have loads more money now. It means they release the $100 each (or whatever it was) watch they said they would in the first place when they said they would (though you could probably forgive them for being a bit slow on delivering to 1/7th of the world's population). EDIT: I think what's being overlooked is the value of the finished product versus the cost to make it. Even though the total funding was in the millions, each individual only paid $10 to get the game (not a pre-order blah blah). As such everyone should expect a $10 value game. If EA pay a developer $4million it's because they expect a $4million cost game.

I thought it was great. I still find the minion antics highly amusing. The love story worked, chemistry was good. Nefario had a decent turn as well. Agnes was cute, Margo was serious and Edith was... Edith. It was more of the same, but I liked the first one and I liked this one too.

Whistler to be precise. For two weeks.

Getting this for Vita one way or another. It will make my flight to Canada in the winter seem too short.