Later this year the Wii will be getting what might be the most sadistically violent video game ever made. I don't quite know how you follow up a game that had you suffocating men with plastic bags, shoving glass shards into their eyes, and doing all the graphic things with a chainsaw that most games only hint at with generic gib splatter, but Manhunt 2 should be interesting, especially with a Wiimote.
These Berkeley assholes need to get their priorities straight. After all the whole point of letting them do their million dollar research is so that I can have a pretty new desktop wallpaper to impress/alienate my coworkers with my profound appreciation of the cosmos. Paging down through their "print-quality" photo section all I can see are disturbing pictures of smiling old men, like some haunting NAMBLA forum.
Yea really. Not used Vista much myself, but the thought of a super-duper revolutionized searching function from the assholes who gave me the annoying little puppy character is honestly somewhat frightening. What the hell are you people looking for anyway? I use search maybe once every few months and it is usually so I can find some piece of a program or the OS itself that might be giving me a problem that needs inspection. My data is right where I left it, catagorized and properly named. It requires opening a folder and simply keying through an alphabetized list. Any of the data that is large enough to warrant something on the level of a database query (music/movie archives) is usually handled by its own software (iTunes, etc). Windows Search exists mostly for people who like to save word documents with the name New Microsoft Word Document (43).doc into the vast wasteland that My Documents soon becomes. People whose mother cleaned their rooms for them when they were younger.
My wiimote and nanchuck can be a guitar, a set of drums, a banjo, a violin, hell some tamboreens, a cymbal, a screaming baby or just about any other batshit crazy instrument you could think up. Why bother designing a crap load of overpriced yet cheap instrument peripherals when they can just plop the game down on a Wii with a few inexpensive plastic apparatuses into which I plug my own already purchased wiimote/nanchuck and call it good for a fraction of the price.
heard the new songs? I'll check later when I get home, but I love nin and was just wondering the other day if trent might be near to releasing some new music. Granted nin has been downhill since downward spiral but here's hoping music released on stray USB keys on the piss covered floor of a filthy concert toilet is indicative of a "return to glory" for the band whose sound of late has had a little too much 80's sap and synth for my taste.
The chimp has no property. Sue him all you like but what happens when you sue a completely indigent person and they cannot pay? The worst that happens is they can goto jail right? So all you've really accomplished is to secure a way for us to justify keeping the chimp in the zoo for longer. You'd have to be a real asshole to follow through with the process of suing a chimp anyway.
Well let's be honest, there is no Moore's law for bandwidth. There are many different commercial factors at work not all of which favor bigger and faster according to net neutrality and common telco conspiracy theories. So I wouldn't be so sure of those bandwidth increases over the next few years. So you're on dialup and don't mind queuing up a movie for days (you madman!). Do you really think that is an attitude the average consumer would share? I was arguing for a simple commercial system for the average simpleton consumer not the uber-geek. Myself, I saturate my dsl connection practically nonstop on all sorts of things, but even I just don't find it worthwhile to spend more than 2 gigs on a single movie file. I don't understand the mindset behind people willing to spend the time/bandwidth/diskspace on a dvd9-dvd5 rip of something when it's much easier to just spend the money (if it's worth having at all) on the retail disc. It just isn't practical to manage, on dvd-r in addition to intial bandwidth cost, a dvd-5 rip. Not compared to going to the store for it. And blu-ray/HD-DVD, forget it. Nothing, I repeat no single collection of ideas is worth a 20+ gigs download. Those people that P2Ped the Serenity HDDVD or whatever it was. They were complete masochists. Just b/c highspeed bandwidth can be purchased on an ulimited plan (and this may even be a fleeting whim of the present) does not render it a cheap commodity without descretionary value. Keep your HD, I'm fine with xvid. I have no need for something whose "must have it" feel depreciates with the real-world considerations of today's download speeds. But hey that's just me.
And how big is that going to be? There is a limit to how much bandwidth/diskspace I'm willing to dedicate to a movie download. If you're talking about HD (which I personally won't be buying into for some time) then you're not going to get anywhere near the quality you're looking for at a reasonable filesize, go buy some blu-ray discs. HD isn't really the target market for this sort of thing anyway, those people have the money to drop on disc purchases and probably don't waste time d/ling pirate copies anyway. Xvid is perfectly fine for a cheap persistent-rental type strategy. If you really like the movie then you can go for a disc, maybe even at a discount. But really, do you see a widespread availability of the type of bandwidth one would need to create a market of HD downloadable movies? YouTube's shit bitrate is being speculated as a possible cause of an eventual catastrophic failure of the internet. No one is really ready to fully embrace HD in that way, in terms of bandwidth and actual equipment adoption. But xvid, that's what people are illegitimately trafficking in already. If you don't think there is a market for something with the somewhat diminished quality of xvid, how do you explain the widespread adoption of VCD for so long, particularly in Asia.
C'mon it's simple really. Sell your movies online at $5 flat. No advertisements. No bullshit DVD menus to slam through with your remote. Absolutely no DRM. Just a professionally encoded xvid file at around 1.2-1.5 gigs in size. Offer it on a site with a fast connection that puts the often snail's pace of P2P to shame. There's very little that I'm not willing to blow $5 on. Seriously. I'd be buying movies all the time. As it is the few DVDs I do buy ($20 a pop is fucking overpriced in such a novelty-driven culture anyway) I immediately rip the movie of the disc b/c I don't feel I should sit through gimmicky menus and obnoxiously forced previews of totally irrelevant flicks I'd never want to see or already know to be shit. Previews are only good for the first week you own the damn dvd, nothing dates a disc like old previews. Movie tickets made the most sense at around $5. This is essentially the same thing. No solid product being sold, just bits of light and sound xferred through the ether. If you're worried people will be expecting things for free why not just try cheap instead. There isn't much of a howling chasm between free and $5. Hell hire John Kricfalusi to voice Ren for your ad campaign. There's something about how an asthmahound says "five bucks!" that makes the amount seem at once trivial and yet an exciting deal. My monday morning coffee is taking me to strange places.
I have played a lot of games. A whole lot, on all kinds of consoles past and present. I don't like RPG games myself, don't like the Sims. I like action games. SA is one of the best ever in that regard. And I can't really think of any other games that managed to maintain their wow factor throughout a 50+ hour experience. I really can't think of any games where every now and then it dawns on me that I haven't actually progressed anywhere story-wise in the last 45 minutes but yet realize I've been having loads of fun nonetheless. Quite the contrary, most games I play I get bored even while progressing. The damn game is near perfect. It constantly has you going I wonder if I can... Yep I sure can! Most gameworlds are full of diminishing expectations as you realize that less and less of your surroundings are actually interactive in realistic ways. Considering the hardware it was released on, I have to say that SA pushed that as far as one could. I'm really surprised there are people that don't dig this game. If you've only played for an hour or two then go back and give it another go. No other game will surprise you with how much it has to offer. Anyway I'm obviously stoked for IV.
I particularly enjoyed the desert missions just outside of las venturas in the last third of the game. I actually wished there was more of them, the desert was my favorite setting. If you keep playing, you leave the las angeles-ish ghetto and go on to a san fransisco-ish and las vegas-ish city each with a very particulary feel to them. Then there's the desert surrounding vegas and the coutry surrounding the other cities. You actually become a sort of fish out of water at that point and converse with a diverse cast of pot-heads, gov spies, and various types really. The only real thugs were your peers in your hood, and it is there where the story is anchored but the game is so much bigger than that. You should really play it through.
I'm honestly not trolling. I know people who won't play San Andreas b/c they say they don't like the "thug" aspect. I know what they were referring to when they said it, but if what you mean by "thug" is just a garden variety criminal of any color then my question to you is why were you even playing a GTA game in the first place? They all start out that way -- bottom feeding criminal to eventual crime boss. What is it about the early 90's, southern California setting that makes this game less acceptable than its previous incarnations.
Come on! What race am I being racist against? Mexicans (Latinos), African Americans, Whites? Please tell, as far as I know more than one race can be considered "thug or gangsta".
Were there white thugs in the early 90's? I seem to recall a term that suspiciously fell by the wayside at some point. That term was "wigger." C'mon it wouldn't make any sense to make the character white or latino anyway. Those architypes were really only explored in pop culture later, after the setting in which the game takes place. These games are all about pop culture and the defining pop culture that San Andreas is targetting is west coast rap -- NWA and the like in the early 90's. Perhaps I was a bit aggressive in my first post and you can call it trolling if you like, but it honestly fascinates me that this one game of the three, a game much wider in scope and an overall more rewarding experience from purely a gameplay perspective, nonetheless illicits such a negative reaction from some people, especially those who enjoyed the earlier GTAs.
You ride a bicycle for only about the first hour of a game that is anywhere from 50 to 100+ hours long, depending on how much you can appreciate a game that is larger than any that came before it and manages to blend seemlessly numerous gameplay genres like few companies have ever accomplished. Do you avoid Mario games because you don't appreciate the Italian-american experience? No wait you liked playing Vice City. I had some real tolerant friends that didn't like the "thug" aspects of San Andreas either. Nice that rascists have new terms to hide behind, kinda like "urban" in movies. It's fine to not like a game if it's shit, but to denigrate a technologically and artistically superior game in favor of it's awesome but decidely inferior prequels all for something as petty as the racial background of the player character (always a degenerate criminal in these games anyway) is strange. It's make believe anyway and personally I'd play a Barbie game if the gameplay was solid. And be forewarned, it looks like you have to play a ruskie in GTA IV. Boohoo...
So by this logic, Martin Scorsese is probably up to no good? Perhaps he's beating someone to death with his Oscar as I type this?
Why do you think they took so long to recognize the man? Would you hand the guy who made Goodfellas a sharp metal object?
If they really were "smart" sunglasses...
on
Smart Sunglasses
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· Score: 1
Will this mean a better Sonic game or will Mario just be pulled into the suck? I just don't feel Sonic has yet found his footing in 3D. Having been playing the delightful Mario Sunshine lately -- taking advantage of the Wii's slow stream of new software to hit up the Gamecube love I missed -- I've been realizing just how great Nintendo's games are. No one really knows actual videogames like the big N. You can have all the WWII shooters and boring stealth games you want. I'm tired of playing in the dark. I think it would be great if Sega would just hand Sonic over to the team that worked on Mario Sunshine (or that new Mario Galaxy that looks fantastic). Or at least get some pointers from those guys. Here's hoping this game is not too true to the Olympics (fun over realism) and that it is more Mario than Sonic. Then I'm stoked. I'm so gay for Nintendo right now!
I just saw Clerks 2 (b/c sometimes I like to punish the Ebert within) and while it itself is a terrible flick, it has perhaps the most perfect summation of my feelings on the LOTR trilogy, albeit the film form. As far as I'm concerned Tolkien Jr. would do well to stray somewhat and make a good action/adventure story (as TFA hints at) instead of the plodding tale his father took too many pages to tell. It had a great setting/world but god what a dull pedantic road trip LOTR was. We get it, the rings is evil. Really evil. Just drop the fucking thing in the volcano already.
Who uses address books anyway? I find the only contacts I put in address books are those for people I will rarely if ever contact again or say, business contacts, and neither of those two catagories include people to whom it would be appropriate to send such flippant spam. Is it so hard to remember someone's email address or perhaps look up a previous message sent from them -- assuming they're not a thoughtless clod with some inane string of random letters and numbers -- if they are really worth exchanging your correspondence? Reminds me of how people can't remember a simple 7-digit phone number anymore, preferring rather to pitch it into their cells and forget about it -- c'mon it's 7 fucking digits, with at most a fairly common 3-digit area code on top. I understand the convenience of an address book, but that doesn't really seem to outweigh the big potential these damn things have for being a big online bomb scattering viri and/or untargeted advertising. This is just one more example and shouldn't we start holding people socially responsible for this garbage? Should be bad manners to get spam from someone because they were careless with their contacts. Then again the "viral" campaigns only work on the blockhead demographic anyway, just be sure you don't wind up in their address books.
The Republican nominee would be a white guy. The point of my post is that the white guy would win. It's like boxing inverted. So the liberal vote would be split between Obama and people who would vote for Obama if he were white, but instead vote for the white Republican because liberal doesn't always mean tolerant.
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Later this year the Wii will be getting what might be the most sadistically violent video game ever made. I don't quite know how you follow up a game that had you suffocating men with plastic bags, shoving glass shards into their eyes, and doing all the graphic things with a chainsaw that most games only hint at with generic gib splatter, but Manhunt 2 should be interesting, especially with a Wiimote.
These Berkeley assholes need to get their priorities straight. After all the whole point of letting them do their million dollar research is so that I can have a pretty new desktop wallpaper to impress/alienate my coworkers with my profound appreciation of the cosmos. Paging down through their "print-quality" photo section all I can see are disturbing pictures of smiling old men, like some haunting NAMBLA forum.
Yea really. Not used Vista much myself, but the thought of a super-duper revolutionized searching function from the assholes who gave me the annoying little puppy character is honestly somewhat frightening. What the hell are you people looking for anyway? I use search maybe once every few months and it is usually so I can find some piece of a program or the OS itself that might be giving me a problem that needs inspection. My data is right where I left it, catagorized and properly named. It requires opening a folder and simply keying through an alphabetized list. Any of the data that is large enough to warrant something on the level of a database query (music/movie archives) is usually handled by its own software (iTunes, etc). Windows Search exists mostly for people who like to save word documents with the name New Microsoft Word Document (43).doc into the vast wasteland that My Documents soon becomes. People whose mother cleaned their rooms for them when they were younger.
My wiimote and nanchuck can be a guitar, a set of drums, a banjo, a violin, hell some tamboreens, a cymbal, a screaming baby or just about any other batshit crazy instrument you could think up. Why bother designing a crap load of overpriced yet cheap instrument peripherals when they can just plop the game down on a Wii with a few inexpensive plastic apparatuses into which I plug my own already purchased wiimote/nanchuck and call it good for a fraction of the price.
Seeing as how it wouldn't replicate itself nor would it pass the Turing test... yes, yes it would.
heard the new songs? I'll check later when I get home, but I love nin and was just wondering the other day if trent might be near to releasing some new music. Granted nin has been downhill since downward spiral but here's hoping music released on stray USB keys on the piss covered floor of a filthy concert toilet is indicative of a "return to glory" for the band whose sound of late has had a little too much 80's sap and synth for my taste.
The chimp has no property. Sue him all you like but what happens when you sue a completely indigent person and they cannot pay? The worst that happens is they can goto jail right? So all you've really accomplished is to secure a way for us to justify keeping the chimp in the zoo for longer. You'd have to be a real asshole to follow through with the process of suing a chimp anyway.
If cats are going to vote then I demand they don periwigs when they do it!
Well let's be honest, there is no Moore's law for bandwidth. There are many different commercial factors at work not all of which favor bigger and faster according to net neutrality and common telco conspiracy theories. So I wouldn't be so sure of those bandwidth increases over the next few years. So you're on dialup and don't mind queuing up a movie for days (you madman!). Do you really think that is an attitude the average consumer would share? I was arguing for a simple commercial system for the average simpleton consumer not the uber-geek. Myself, I saturate my dsl connection practically nonstop on all sorts of things, but even I just don't find it worthwhile to spend more than 2 gigs on a single movie file. I don't understand the mindset behind people willing to spend the time/bandwidth/diskspace on a dvd9-dvd5 rip of something when it's much easier to just spend the money (if it's worth having at all) on the retail disc. It just isn't practical to manage, on dvd-r in addition to intial bandwidth cost, a dvd-5 rip. Not compared to going to the store for it. And blu-ray/HD-DVD, forget it. Nothing, I repeat no single collection of ideas is worth a 20+ gigs download. Those people that P2Ped the Serenity HDDVD or whatever it was. They were complete masochists. Just b/c highspeed bandwidth can be purchased on an ulimited plan (and this may even be a fleeting whim of the present) does not render it a cheap commodity without descretionary value. Keep your HD, I'm fine with xvid. I have no need for something whose "must have it" feel depreciates with the real-world considerations of today's download speeds. But hey that's just me.
And how big is that going to be? There is a limit to how much bandwidth/diskspace I'm willing to dedicate to a movie download. If you're talking about HD (which I personally won't be buying into for some time) then you're not going to get anywhere near the quality you're looking for at a reasonable filesize, go buy some blu-ray discs. HD isn't really the target market for this sort of thing anyway, those people have the money to drop on disc purchases and probably don't waste time d/ling pirate copies anyway. Xvid is perfectly fine for a cheap persistent-rental type strategy. If you really like the movie then you can go for a disc, maybe even at a discount. But really, do you see a widespread availability of the type of bandwidth one would need to create a market of HD downloadable movies? YouTube's shit bitrate is being speculated as a possible cause of an eventual catastrophic failure of the internet. No one is really ready to fully embrace HD in that way, in terms of bandwidth and actual equipment adoption. But xvid, that's what people are illegitimately trafficking in already. If you don't think there is a market for something with the somewhat diminished quality of xvid, how do you explain the widespread adoption of VCD for so long, particularly in Asia.
C'mon it's simple really. Sell your movies online at $5 flat. No advertisements. No bullshit DVD menus to slam through with your remote. Absolutely no DRM. Just a professionally encoded xvid file at around 1.2-1.5 gigs in size. Offer it on a site with a fast connection that puts the often snail's pace of P2P to shame. There's very little that I'm not willing to blow $5 on. Seriously. I'd be buying movies all the time. As it is the few DVDs I do buy ($20 a pop is fucking overpriced in such a novelty-driven culture anyway) I immediately rip the movie of the disc b/c I don't feel I should sit through gimmicky menus and obnoxiously forced previews of totally irrelevant flicks I'd never want to see or already know to be shit. Previews are only good for the first week you own the damn dvd, nothing dates a disc like old previews. Movie tickets made the most sense at around $5. This is essentially the same thing. No solid product being sold, just bits of light and sound xferred through the ether. If you're worried people will be expecting things for free why not just try cheap instead. There isn't much of a howling chasm between free and $5. Hell hire John Kricfalusi to voice Ren for your ad campaign. There's something about how an asthmahound says "five bucks!" that makes the amount seem at once trivial and yet an exciting deal. My monday morning coffee is taking me to strange places.
I have played a lot of games. A whole lot, on all kinds of consoles past and present. I don't like RPG games myself, don't like the Sims. I like action games. SA is one of the best ever in that regard. And I can't really think of any other games that managed to maintain their wow factor throughout a 50+ hour experience. I really can't think of any games where every now and then it dawns on me that I haven't actually progressed anywhere story-wise in the last 45 minutes but yet realize I've been having loads of fun nonetheless. Quite the contrary, most games I play I get bored even while progressing. The damn game is near perfect. It constantly has you going I wonder if I can... Yep I sure can! Most gameworlds are full of diminishing expectations as you realize that less and less of your surroundings are actually interactive in realistic ways. Considering the hardware it was released on, I have to say that SA pushed that as far as one could. I'm really surprised there are people that don't dig this game. If you've only played for an hour or two then go back and give it another go. No other game will surprise you with how much it has to offer. Anyway I'm obviously stoked for IV.
Well IGN certainly isn't flawless. Guess I'll have to give it a shot afterall. You've convinced me.
I particularly enjoyed the desert missions just outside of las venturas in the last third of the game. I actually wished there was more of them, the desert was my favorite setting. If you keep playing, you leave the las angeles-ish ghetto and go on to a san fransisco-ish and las vegas-ish city each with a very particulary feel to them. Then there's the desert surrounding vegas and the coutry surrounding the other cities. You actually become a sort of fish out of water at that point and converse with a diverse cast of pot-heads, gov spies, and various types really. The only real thugs were your peers in your hood, and it is there where the story is anchored but the game is so much bigger than that. You should really play it through.
Exactly what metric do you use for something like "pwnage?" Say vocal decibels of a squealing adolescent boy, like on XBox Live?
Come on! What race am I being racist against? Mexicans (Latinos), African Americans, Whites? Please tell, as far as I know more than one race can be considered "thug or gangsta".
Were there white thugs in the early 90's? I seem to recall a term that suspiciously fell by the wayside at some point. That term was "wigger." C'mon it wouldn't make any sense to make the character white or latino anyway. Those architypes were really only explored in pop culture later, after the setting in which the game takes place. These games are all about pop culture and the defining pop culture that San Andreas is targetting is west coast rap -- NWA and the like in the early 90's. Perhaps I was a bit aggressive in my first post and you can call it trolling if you like, but it honestly fascinates me that this one game of the three, a game much wider in scope and an overall more rewarding experience from purely a gameplay perspective, nonetheless illicits such a negative reaction from some people, especially those who enjoyed the earlier GTAs.
You ride a bicycle for only about the first hour of a game that is anywhere from 50 to 100+ hours long, depending on how much you can appreciate a game that is larger than any that came before it and manages to blend seemlessly numerous gameplay genres like few companies have ever accomplished. Do you avoid Mario games because you don't appreciate the Italian-american experience? No wait you liked playing Vice City. I had some real tolerant friends that didn't like the "thug" aspects of San Andreas either. Nice that rascists have new terms to hide behind, kinda like "urban" in movies. It's fine to not like a game if it's shit, but to denigrate a technologically and artistically superior game in favor of it's awesome but decidely inferior prequels all for something as petty as the racial background of the player character (always a degenerate criminal in these games anyway) is strange. It's make believe anyway and personally I'd play a Barbie game if the gameplay was solid. And be forewarned, it looks like you have to play a ruskie in GTA IV. Boohoo...
Why do you think they took so long to recognize the man? Would you hand the guy who made Goodfellas a sharp metal object?
wouldn't they tell you what color they should be?
When IGN gives a game a 6.9, I'm not exactly filled with anticipation.
Will this mean a better Sonic game or will Mario just be pulled into the suck? I just don't feel Sonic has yet found his footing in 3D. Having been playing the delightful Mario Sunshine lately -- taking advantage of the Wii's slow stream of new software to hit up the Gamecube love I missed -- I've been realizing just how great Nintendo's games are. No one really knows actual videogames like the big N. You can have all the WWII shooters and boring stealth games you want. I'm tired of playing in the dark. I think it would be great if Sega would just hand Sonic over to the team that worked on Mario Sunshine (or that new Mario Galaxy that looks fantastic). Or at least get some pointers from those guys. Here's hoping this game is not too true to the Olympics (fun over realism) and that it is more Mario than Sonic. Then I'm stoked. I'm so gay for Nintendo right now!
I just saw Clerks 2 (b/c sometimes I like to punish the Ebert within) and while it itself is a terrible flick, it has perhaps the most perfect summation of my feelings on the LOTR trilogy, albeit the film form. As far as I'm concerned Tolkien Jr. would do well to stray somewhat and make a good action/adventure story (as TFA hints at) instead of the plodding tale his father took too many pages to tell. It had a great setting/world but god what a dull pedantic road trip LOTR was. We get it, the rings is evil. Really evil. Just drop the fucking thing in the volcano already.
Who uses address books anyway? I find the only contacts I put in address books are those for people I will rarely if ever contact again or say, business contacts, and neither of those two catagories include people to whom it would be appropriate to send such flippant spam. Is it so hard to remember someone's email address or perhaps look up a previous message sent from them -- assuming they're not a thoughtless clod with some inane string of random letters and numbers -- if they are really worth exchanging your correspondence? Reminds me of how people can't remember a simple 7-digit phone number anymore, preferring rather to pitch it into their cells and forget about it -- c'mon it's 7 fucking digits, with at most a fairly common 3-digit area code on top. I understand the convenience of an address book, but that doesn't really seem to outweigh the big potential these damn things have for being a big online bomb scattering viri and/or untargeted advertising. This is just one more example and shouldn't we start holding people socially responsible for this garbage? Should be bad manners to get spam from someone because they were careless with their contacts. Then again the "viral" campaigns only work on the blockhead demographic anyway, just be sure you don't wind up in their address books.
The Republican nominee would be a white guy. The point of my post is that the white guy would win. It's like boxing inverted. So the liberal vote would be split between Obama and people who would vote for Obama if he were white, but instead vote for the white Republican because liberal doesn't always mean tolerant.
Plus it had Insane Clown Posse on the soundtrack. Take that Russia!