Actually I was just pointing out the absurdity of anticipating a windfall on property investments as a result of such a large and relatively sudden displacement of people. When in the past has there been a peaceful relocation of large amounts of people? Even something as relatively minor as the Katrina storm put a major strain on the surrounding areas. And I wasn't threatening home invasion. Merely pointing out with some sarcasm that it's quite possibly going to be a hell of a lot more chaotic than something a few rifles and a John Wayne attitude will be able to cope with. But good luck cowboy. I'm pretty sure I'll be fed up with this place before then anyway. Time to start spinning that globe.
I for one will strive to honor your real estate investments to the best of my efforts as I flee desperately from my submerged home along with hundreds of thousands of fellow refugees. I'll try not to raid your garden, but I can't promise I won't be hungry form all that travel. Sure it will be rough, but let's face the facts. If Katrina proved anything, it's that we'll be taken care of in case of a disaster.
I don't know, I'm going to have to vote for the cockroach as best adapter. Those bastards won't die.
Tell that to my cat. The little bastard's a regular Joseph Stalin. Just wish he would eat the remains.
Is the complaint here that you can't spend millions on the development of a game. I seem to recall EA bitching about the cost of making games in today's world, and they seem all to happy to jump on the Wii bandwagon of late. Maybe games just shouldn't take 100+ people 2 years of development. Compare raw manhours for games of today to games like the original mario bros and tell me that this whole push for graphics hasn't been more than a little misfocused for years now. God of War was fun, but I really doubt I'll fire it up again much in the future. I still play mario bros from time to time. Maybe in the future we can have the computer procedurally generate all those minute details that cost so much for a human to make, and maybe right now we should just concentrate on gameplay, fun factor, physics is fun. Why should games always ride the bleeding edge of technology anyway? Maybe they should stay comfortable back a few paces until the smart guys figure out how best to use that power on the other end. Maybe then I wouldn't have to upgrade (read completely replace) my console more often than my PC.
Google should just pull out of China and, in secret, play cupid between Microsoft and China. Microsoft is dying to get in on Google's market, and China requires a company with very little scruples to do its bidding. Red China and Redmond. I'm thinking match made in heaven. I'm sure Vista Live would be more than happy to implement China's new online game playtime restrictions at the kernel level. Even the Zune is probably an amazing little gadget to people who have lived in abject poverty for all of their lives. China can certainly spread venemous propaganda against the already uncooperative Google and thwart any future web-based office solutions in the country, a coup for MS Office. While Microsoft continues to spiral into the dumper with stale hubris here in the states, they could eventually relocate operations completely to China. Then in WWIII when we duke it out with China, we can all feel better knowing we're going after true evil, like the good old days in WWII instead of all this bullying in the desert of late. Imagine an enemy waving big red flags with the windows logo displayed fearsomely across its face. True terror. But now that China has moved all of it's important military software to Windows, a concerted effort from script kiddies around the world should be able to crash their whole system within days. If we are victorious, we bring down an oppressive government and a software monopoly in one fell swoop.
Or Google could just stay in China and bank off of over a billion people too docile and controlled to change their world. Business as usual.
Yea, it's such a trivial and childish complaint really. A standalone dvd player can be had for cheap, and be much more capable. For ~$50 you can buy a dvd player that will play xvid/divx/wmf/mp3. Personally I'd rather see xvid playback on the Wii than dvd. Through smb or external hdd. That would be sweet. I'd rather not wear out my Wii drive playing movies. That's what my old modded xbox (with an easily replaceable dvd drive) is for:)
Status symbols are not there to invite friendship. They exist to frustrate and browbeat. The fact that you're seen as a dickhead is kind of the point really. Screw 'em. Let them pay for the gas, we couldn't fix the environment even if we tried.
This could actually be something if they got the right people involved. The thing to remember is that scifi in general, and the Terminator series particularly, only works as a background to a great central human story. T2 was basically an unnecessary retread of T1 story-wise. What made it great was Cameron's superb screen-writing. One has plenty of material to work with here if they had the talent to put together a good screenplay and get a good director. You basically have a war movie, but with lasers and fucking robots! What isn't cool about that? Most of the sets would take place in veritable junkyards at night so it isn't as though the sets need to cost much. Hell you could fly to Iraq and shoot in the "greenzone" for pennies. Just kidding, but nevertheless that frees up more money for the CG robots. And one could buy up the rights to use Arnie's likeness and do a CG T-800 in the movie. It is said that the first Terminators had rubber skins, a perfect excuse if the effect doesn't necessarily look too convincing, although after seeing Golum and Davy Jones I'm not too sure it couldn't be pulled off anymore. It's a robot, it doesn't require emotive facial expressions.
In a perfect world I'd have Paul Verhoeven direct the first one as a straight up action movie. Then get Spielberg to direct the second as a "war is hell" dark piece. Say what you will about his catalog but no one does war movies like that man. Reanimate Stanley Kubrick to do the third and leave us with a delicious, morally ambiguous climax. All that said, I have no doubt they'll completely fuck up the movie. And the last two will be straight to video if anything.
Why would that take repeated viewings? I almost walked out during the scene where Arnie has a program-conflict and does his pants-shitting routine before pummeling the hood of a car like it was a direct affront to my film watching sensibilities. The implementation of the T-X character makes the live show at Universal Studios look like an award-winning broadway production and that scene where skynet kicks off a worldwide nuclear war makes Dr. Strangelove look like hard sci-fi.
Have you seen the director's cut? I always feel I have to recommend this to anyone who thinks Fincher dropped the ball on Alien 3. There is an entire religious subplot that was lifted from the movie and its omission basically kills the soul of the project. One of the prisoners assigns an almost mystical quality to the alien which I think adds another layer to what was pretty much just a monster movie. It has an atmosphere that reminds me of a Dark Horse comic or something out of Heavy Metal. OTOH, Alien Resurrection does just piss all over the face of the series.
I have to agree. But the coolness factor is inversely proportional to the temperature of George Lucas' body. At least Gene Roddenberry had the good graces to die early and let more talented people squeeze out a few good things from his interesting little creation. George Lucas is just a huge cock-block on a film universe that has so much potential. Looking at all the inspired designs that went into the new Star Wars movies -- the ships, the worlds, Ewan fucking McGregor -- all strangled to death by a terrible central story and piss-poor direction and it just makes me want scream just die you bearded monster!
why shredding was considered such an effective means of destroying documents. Hey lets cut the paper into equally sized strips, then just toss it into the garbage. Seems quite conceivable any truly interested party could design a device for scanning a mountain of shredded paper. Ever seen how they make hotdogs? Or any other assembly line product. From that point it's only time and electricity before things get sorted out. You have what I would assume is a fairly parallelizable operation that these fancy new multi-core processors could attack pretty well. The algorithms developed for image recognition are getting better and better. I had wondered why the Enron paper-shredding was such an daunting barrier. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to give something like that a shot, if anyone really cared to seek justice in the first place. Shouldn't we hold on to shredded docs in high profile cases, the big corporate and political ones, in case some time in the future we had the tech to tackle this problem. People would probably just start burning things in response to such measures, but burning large quantities of paper is quite a bit more conspicuous an operation. And that above post about crosscutting was brilliant!
I loved the countryside. I wish they had 3 times as much. When I was younger we used to ride dirt bikes in the Colorado mountains. I hope they have long bike trails and less coarse geometry in the next one. Grabbing a dirtbike and hitting the countryside was sometimes all I did in SA. The bronco cops were real fun to mess with too. Those suckers were squirrelly. Killing rednecks was very rewarding in general. Hopefully they'll have a pseudo-Walmart in GTA IV so I can go on a justified killing spree.
You wouldn't get the far. 10 sec into the game you'd see: Kicked by console - god you ping sucks, what are you on a fucking desert island or something?!
Hugo Elias has an excellent demo of this effect on his site. Check it out and tell me this spinning cube doesn't look more real with the motion blur. It's a little eerie. I've seen this effect in some footage for that new game Little Big World among others. It's a framebuffer effect I believe. I wonder if its inclusion in more game will have any effect on traditional framerate requirements for believable motion. Might get by with less as you say. Then again, to do it correctly I believe you have to render even more frames than are actually made visible. Much like good anti-aliasing requires oversampling the image, this temporal anti-aliasing would require oversampling frames for the objects at high velocities. And to the other reply, yes we want it to look like we're playing a recording. Reality is boring, the typical approach is to emulate a movie experience. Lens flares and high-dynamic range lighting. You view is referred to as a "camera" in most games. These aren't things you see in real-life. The object is to go theatrical.
I thought you UK'ers typically paid more than us. Around here a 360 controller is $50, while a Wiimote is $40 (ofcourse the nanchuck is $20 more). Frankly both prices make me sick, it's a fucking controller, but at least the wiimote is different enough to make me forget the extortionate price for a moment. I don't even know about a ps3 controller, I don't have $600 to even start thinking along those lines. Then again I don't have $400 for a 360 either. I had XBox Live for a year on the original xbox and it was about as wonderful as your typical computer game with free online. Counterstrike Source offers the same matchmaking and voice chat for free. If the extra value you're talking about is the gamerscore shit and marketplace (paying for the chance to shop? my cellphone company gives me the same burning sensation along the walls of my anus) then you can keep them. That stuff is just silly. As far as the 360 failure rate, I don't know the actual numbers either, but it is certainly significant in that I'm afraid to buy one, afraid to buy a PS3 either for the matter.
I have an original NES that still works for christ sake. I've never had to send in a system for repairs and don't relish the thought of starting now. Before you start bashing someone for being a PS3 fanboy, take a look at your own loyalties. The simple fact is there is almost no worthwhile software out for any of these next gen systems (not even my beloved little Wii), and we're being asked to throw out a lot of money just to get started. I haven't owned a Nintendo system in almost a decade, but with the Wii they at least offered me a neat little system with a price-tag that was the smallest gamble. Sony and MS are both still worried about getting out of the red despite basically pricing themselves out of harmless-little-hobby territory. Hell I just want to play the new Burnout when it's released, but before I can do that I have to worry about which system is going to survive it's own company's hubris. And remember it's your brand loyalty that is fueling this madness. I think Sony, MS, and Nintendo all need to prove to us that video games are a relevant activity beyong sheer geek extravagance.
Actually I have to call bullshit on that one. The first game presents the ringworld quite clearly on the title screen and there is no evidence of there being any high walls. If you look you can actually see the oceans running all the way up to the edges of the ring. So the atmocylinder (is no one going to challenge that crappy portemanteau?) cannot be kept at bay with walls. Is this something stated in the Halo novels or what? Walls would have been cooler anyway. Massive fucking walls on the horizon.
God thank you. I really wanted to like it but that movie is pretty horrid. For some reason I think it's really beloved just for being so Irish. That's the kind of attitude that keeps that ass Carlos Mencia from getting his terrible show cancelled. "Hey I'm Mexican and he's Mexican so that must imply that he's funny!" What is it with all this mindless tribal endorsing. Judge something on its own merits. The fact that you've been modded flamebait just goes to show the strange cloud around that film. It's just plain bad. Bad story. Bad direction. Though I did like the actors involved which makes it so much more painful.
How did this get +3 Funny? He screwed the order up and didn't even bother to use the funnier colloquialism "bump it's ass a'hoppin'!" No imagination. Then again I could tell you an even funnier and more cliché quip, but then I'd have to kill ya! Ha!
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Actually I was just pointing out the absurdity of anticipating a windfall on property investments as a result of such a large and relatively sudden displacement of people. When in the past has there been a peaceful relocation of large amounts of people? Even something as relatively minor as the Katrina storm put a major strain on the surrounding areas. And I wasn't threatening home invasion. Merely pointing out with some sarcasm that it's quite possibly going to be a hell of a lot more chaotic than something a few rifles and a John Wayne attitude will be able to cope with. But good luck cowboy. I'm pretty sure I'll be fed up with this place before then anyway. Time to start spinning that globe.
I for one will strive to honor your real estate investments to the best of my efforts as I flee desperately from my submerged home along with hundreds of thousands of fellow refugees. I'll try not to raid your garden, but I can't promise I won't be hungry form all that travel. Sure it will be rough, but let's face the facts. If Katrina proved anything, it's that we'll be taken care of in case of a disaster.
Tell that to my cat. The little bastard's a regular Joseph Stalin. Just wish he would eat the remains.
Is the complaint here that you can't spend millions on the development of a game. I seem to recall EA bitching about the cost of making games in today's world, and they seem all to happy to jump on the Wii bandwagon of late. Maybe games just shouldn't take 100+ people 2 years of development. Compare raw manhours for games of today to games like the original mario bros and tell me that this whole push for graphics hasn't been more than a little misfocused for years now. God of War was fun, but I really doubt I'll fire it up again much in the future. I still play mario bros from time to time. Maybe in the future we can have the computer procedurally generate all those minute details that cost so much for a human to make, and maybe right now we should just concentrate on gameplay, fun factor, physics is fun. Why should games always ride the bleeding edge of technology anyway? Maybe they should stay comfortable back a few paces until the smart guys figure out how best to use that power on the other end. Maybe then I wouldn't have to upgrade (read completely replace) my console more often than my PC.
Google should just pull out of China and, in secret, play cupid between Microsoft and China. Microsoft is dying to get in on Google's market, and China requires a company with very little scruples to do its bidding. Red China and Redmond. I'm thinking match made in heaven. I'm sure Vista Live would be more than happy to implement China's new online game playtime restrictions at the kernel level. Even the Zune is probably an amazing little gadget to people who have lived in abject poverty for all of their lives. China can certainly spread venemous propaganda against the already uncooperative Google and thwart any future web-based office solutions in the country, a coup for MS Office. While Microsoft continues to spiral into the dumper with stale hubris here in the states, they could eventually relocate operations completely to China. Then in WWIII when we duke it out with China, we can all feel better knowing we're going after true evil, like the good old days in WWII instead of all this bullying in the desert of late. Imagine an enemy waving big red flags with the windows logo displayed fearsomely across its face. True terror. But now that China has moved all of it's important military software to Windows, a concerted effort from script kiddies around the world should be able to crash their whole system within days. If we are victorious, we bring down an oppressive government and a software monopoly in one fell swoop.
Or Google could just stay in China and bank off of over a billion people too docile and controlled to change their world. Business as usual.
Yea, it's such a trivial and childish complaint really. A standalone dvd player can be had for cheap, and be much more capable. For ~$50 you can buy a dvd player that will play xvid/divx/wmf/mp3. Personally I'd rather see xvid playback on the Wii than dvd. Through smb or external hdd. That would be sweet. I'd rather not wear out my Wii drive playing movies. That's what my old modded xbox (with an easily replaceable dvd drive) is for:)
We're going to need horsepower to survive the future!
Status symbols are not there to invite friendship. They exist to frustrate and browbeat. The fact that you're seen as a dickhead is kind of the point really. Screw 'em. Let them pay for the gas, we couldn't fix the environment even if we tried.
Ironic that the remains of the transporter chief lie in an area so inaccessible. A solid advocate for beam technology even from beyond the grave!
This could actually be something if they got the right people involved. The thing to remember is that scifi in general, and the Terminator series particularly, only works as a background to a great central human story. T2 was basically an unnecessary retread of T1 story-wise. What made it great was Cameron's superb screen-writing. One has plenty of material to work with here if they had the talent to put together a good screenplay and get a good director. You basically have a war movie, but with lasers and fucking robots! What isn't cool about that? Most of the sets would take place in veritable junkyards at night so it isn't as though the sets need to cost much. Hell you could fly to Iraq and shoot in the "greenzone" for pennies. Just kidding, but nevertheless that frees up more money for the CG robots. And one could buy up the rights to use Arnie's likeness and do a CG T-800 in the movie. It is said that the first Terminators had rubber skins, a perfect excuse if the effect doesn't necessarily look too convincing, although after seeing Golum and Davy Jones I'm not too sure it couldn't be pulled off anymore. It's a robot, it doesn't require emotive facial expressions.
In a perfect world I'd have Paul Verhoeven direct the first one as a straight up action movie. Then get Spielberg to direct the second as a "war is hell" dark piece. Say what you will about his catalog but no one does war movies like that man. Reanimate Stanley Kubrick to do the third and leave us with a delicious, morally ambiguous climax. All that said, I have no doubt they'll completely fuck up the movie. And the last two will be straight to video if anything.
Why would that take repeated viewings? I almost walked out during the scene where Arnie has a program-conflict and does his pants-shitting routine before pummeling the hood of a car like it was a direct affront to my film watching sensibilities. The implementation of the T-X character makes the live show at Universal Studios look like an award-winning broadway production and that scene where skynet kicks off a worldwide nuclear war makes Dr. Strangelove look like hard sci-fi.
Have you seen the director's cut? I always feel I have to recommend this to anyone who thinks Fincher dropped the ball on Alien 3. There is an entire religious subplot that was lifted from the movie and its omission basically kills the soul of the project. One of the prisoners assigns an almost mystical quality to the alien which I think adds another layer to what was pretty much just a monster movie. It has an atmosphere that reminds me of a Dark Horse comic or something out of Heavy Metal. OTOH, Alien Resurrection does just piss all over the face of the series.
I have to agree. But the coolness factor is inversely proportional to the temperature of George Lucas' body. At least Gene Roddenberry had the good graces to die early and let more talented people squeeze out a few good things from his interesting little creation. George Lucas is just a huge cock-block on a film universe that has so much potential. Looking at all the inspired designs that went into the new Star Wars movies -- the ships, the worlds, Ewan fucking McGregor -- all strangled to death by a terrible central story and piss-poor direction and it just makes me want scream just die you bearded monster!
why shredding was considered such an effective means of destroying documents. Hey lets cut the paper into equally sized strips, then just toss it into the garbage. Seems quite conceivable any truly interested party could design a device for scanning a mountain of shredded paper. Ever seen how they make hotdogs? Or any other assembly line product. From that point it's only time and electricity before things get sorted out. You have what I would assume is a fairly parallelizable operation that these fancy new multi-core processors could attack pretty well. The algorithms developed for image recognition are getting better and better. I had wondered why the Enron paper-shredding was such an daunting barrier. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to give something like that a shot, if anyone really cared to seek justice in the first place. Shouldn't we hold on to shredded docs in high profile cases, the big corporate and political ones, in case some time in the future we had the tech to tackle this problem. People would probably just start burning things in response to such measures, but burning large quantities of paper is quite a bit more conspicuous an operation. And that above post about crosscutting was brilliant!
we all care Thank you! I've been looking all over for a good signature!
Those 3-month trials typically all expire near the same date, it's not as though you can just hoard them all up and play free for years.
I loved the countryside. I wish they had 3 times as much. When I was younger we used to ride dirt bikes in the Colorado mountains. I hope they have long bike trails and less coarse geometry in the next one. Grabbing a dirtbike and hitting the countryside was sometimes all I did in SA. The bronco cops were real fun to mess with too. Those suckers were squirrelly. Killing rednecks was very rewarding in general. Hopefully they'll have a pseudo-Walmart in GTA IV so I can go on a justified killing spree.
You wouldn't get the far. 10 sec into the game you'd see:
Kicked by console - god you ping sucks, what are you on a fucking desert island or something?!
Hugo Elias has an excellent demo of this effect on his site. Check it out and tell me this spinning cube doesn't look more real with the motion blur. It's a little eerie. I've seen this effect in some footage for that new game Little Big World among others. It's a framebuffer effect I believe. I wonder if its inclusion in more game will have any effect on traditional framerate requirements for believable motion. Might get by with less as you say. Then again, to do it correctly I believe you have to render even more frames than are actually made visible. Much like good anti-aliasing requires oversampling the image, this temporal anti-aliasing would require oversampling frames for the objects at high velocities. And to the other reply, yes we want it to look like we're playing a recording. Reality is boring, the typical approach is to emulate a movie experience. Lens flares and high-dynamic range lighting. You view is referred to as a "camera" in most games. These aren't things you see in real-life. The object is to go theatrical.
I thought you UK'ers typically paid more than us. Around here a 360 controller is $50, while a Wiimote is $40 (ofcourse the nanchuck is $20 more). Frankly both prices make me sick, it's a fucking controller, but at least the wiimote is different enough to make me forget the extortionate price for a moment. I don't even know about a ps3 controller, I don't have $600 to even start thinking along those lines. Then again I don't have $400 for a 360 either. I had XBox Live for a year on the original xbox and it was about as wonderful as your typical computer game with free online. Counterstrike Source offers the same matchmaking and voice chat for free. If the extra value you're talking about is the gamerscore shit and marketplace (paying for the chance to shop? my cellphone company gives me the same burning sensation along the walls of my anus) then you can keep them. That stuff is just silly. As far as the 360 failure rate, I don't know the actual numbers either, but it is certainly significant in that I'm afraid to buy one, afraid to buy a PS3 either for the matter.
I have an original NES that still works for christ sake. I've never had to send in a system for repairs and don't relish the thought of starting now. Before you start bashing someone for being a PS3 fanboy, take a look at your own loyalties. The simple fact is there is almost no worthwhile software out for any of these next gen systems (not even my beloved little Wii), and we're being asked to throw out a lot of money just to get started. I haven't owned a Nintendo system in almost a decade, but with the Wii they at least offered me a neat little system with a price-tag that was the smallest gamble. Sony and MS are both still worried about getting out of the red despite basically pricing themselves out of harmless-little-hobby territory. Hell I just want to play the new Burnout when it's released, but before I can do that I have to worry about which system is going to survive it's own company's hubris. And remember it's your brand loyalty that is fueling this madness. I think Sony, MS, and Nintendo all need to prove to us that video games are a relevant activity beyong sheer geek extravagance.
Make your time wombats. All your chicken coup are belong to us!
Actually I have to call bullshit on that one. The first game presents the ringworld quite clearly on the title screen and there is no evidence of there being any high walls. If you look you can actually see the oceans running all the way up to the edges of the ring. So the atmocylinder (is no one going to challenge that crappy portemanteau?) cannot be kept at bay with walls. Is this something stated in the Halo novels or what? Walls would have been cooler anyway. Massive fucking walls on the horizon.
God thank you. I really wanted to like it but that movie is pretty horrid. For some reason I think it's really beloved just for being so Irish. That's the kind of attitude that keeps that ass Carlos Mencia from getting his terrible show cancelled. "Hey I'm Mexican and he's Mexican so that must imply that he's funny!" What is it with all this mindless tribal endorsing. Judge something on its own merits. The fact that you've been modded flamebait just goes to show the strange cloud around that film. It's just plain bad. Bad story. Bad direction. Though I did like the actors involved which makes it so much more painful.
How did this get +3 Funny? He screwed the order up and didn't even bother to use the funnier colloquialism "bump it's ass a'hoppin'!" No imagination. Then again I could tell you an even funnier and more cliché quip, but then I'd have to kill ya! Ha!