Lego recently launched Quatro - double the size again, for kids too young even for Duplo. I'm definitely buying a boxful for my baby once he's old enough (there is enough Duplo and Lego still around from when I was tiny).
Both of those sound really rather interesting - I'll have to give them a go.
We've got the Lord Of The Rings Risk (and expansion set). That is also really good, as the Fellowship moves the Ring across the board, acting like a time limit with a random element (the Ring only moves on some die throws). Also, many of the borders between territories are mountains (necessary because Middle Earth is a single continent), but there are special cards you can play that can occasionally give you passage across them. You've got the Heroes thing from Godstorm, and fortresses too.
However, the Original Trilogy Star Wars set was a monumental waste of money. I'm not exactly the biggest geek in the world, but anyone prepared to spend the kind of cash the nice "collectors edition" costs is going to know enough Star Wars to answer 90% of their questions without even thinking too hard.
We just use the nice pewter pieces and comedy R2 electronic die substitute with Genus questions.
Philips do a really nice looking one, with styling by Nike. Its all funky and orange, and I'd have one if only they weren't so damn short on space (I'd want at least a 1Gb one, but they're only 256Mb).
"DTS just sounds nicer 'cause it's usually twice that."
Unfortunately, I've not seen a proper 1536kbps DTS track in years; have there been recent ones I've missed, then? Its a pity; DTS laserdiscs are amazing.
According to Amazon.co.uk, Play.com and every other UK retailer I've heard from, the UK's supply of new-size PS2s has sold out, and they weren't expecting volume quantities until January when I looked last week.
So a LOT of kids are getting XBoxes under the Christmas tree if Sony don't get a move on. The PSP is still in 'trendy hype-machine' mode, and not at mass-profit levels yet - those sales can wait more than PS2s can.
Re:TV is actually worse than movies...
on
TV Piracy is Next
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· Score: 1
"Joe Average will buy one of 4-5 big brands without even knowing about all this region mess"
Except that my Toshiba is multi-region, so is my friend's Pioneer, and even another friend's Sony that they bought from the actual Sony shop.
"Not all of the violent games have a bad context, but it doesn't mean none of them have."
a) Well, exactly. Which is why you need to look at them properly to understand why GTA is more unsuitable for kids than Halo 2.
b) Actually playing the games would mean they wouldn't suggest that the new Prince Of Persia is one of the most suitable games of the year for kids, when the showers of gore you can achieve with your two-sword technique are far more impressive than anything I've seen in most of the games on the 'worst' list.
c) As much as people love to attack GTA for being a game where 'you beat up prostitutes', I managed to play every title in the series for a good 40+ hours each (apart from San Andreas, which I don't yet have) without doing so at all. The game merely reacts in an intelligent way to what you ask your character to do. Its up to you if you want to be such a horrible person; the main missions largely involve a lot of fast driving, and the killing is usually bunch of fellow criminals rather than random members of the public.
Do you really believe that all 110 episodes of B5 are not worth the purchase? The £40 per set is excellent value, if you ask me, for one of (if not the) best SF programs ever made.
If you only think its worth £20 for a 30-disc set, I'm surprised you have a DVD player at all.
Re:"I'm amazed that movies caught on before TV"
on
TV Piracy is Next
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· Score: 1
I'm more amazed that he thinks movies caught on before TV. I was watching Buffy downloads back around series 4, and yet I've only once even considered downloading a film, and that was when I heard that the dual-layer Academy screeners of Lord Of The Rings looked slightly better than the commecial releases I already owned (thanks to less edge enhancement). Couldn't find them, by the way, so I've still never downloaded a film.
Re:TV is actually worse than movies...
on
TV Piracy is Next
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· Score: 1
Does that still exist? Here in the UK I've only rarely seen a DVD player which has it enabled since about 2000. Seriously - I can get a multi-region player from Amazon or Asda (the UK subsidiary of Walmart), let alone specialist shops.
A big part of the problem is international sales. Between waiting a year to see them and watching the episodes get cut to shreds by idiot schedulers who can't get their head round the idea that "Fantasy != Aimed At 5-year-olds", loads of us in the UK downloaded Buffy and Angel while they were on.
Which means fewer people actually watching them on broadcast TV, and so the channel not being prepared to shell out much money for the rights to broadcast them.
The irony of all this is that we (the people who download episodes of things) are actually contributing to the dumbing down of television. When people watch "the good stuff" by downloading advert-free encodes, TV execs will be more interested in screening reality-show crap that gets watched by those who don't do such things.
Friday Night on Fox TV seems to be in a constant trap of advertising 12-episode box sets by only showing the first couple of them before switching to something else.
"Personally, I thank Interfaith for compiling this year's Christmas shopping list for me."
Sorry to disappoint you, then. One of the 10 'worst' games is Hitman: Blood Money. Not only have they not played it, however, but they've not seen anyone else play it, either - the game isn't finished yet and has a 2005 release date.
Unfortunately, persuading the developers to turn it into a church attendance sim at the last moment, just for comedy value, could be difficult.
Block the IM port on the router. Its a security-hole-ridden load of crap anyway. If they want to chat for hours online, at least make them use something less horrible.
If they're non-geeks, the 'oh dear, is the internet down?' excuse will put off the argument for a while, too!
Re:Please take your brain out of first gear
on
The VHS is Dead
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· Score: 1
Given that Asda have DVD-Recorders around £200 in the UK now, I think the only question is about whether there will even be any play-only machines around by the time Blu-Ray and HD-DVD start duking it out to be the one stomping on the DVD player's corpse.
Dixons stopped VHS because of profits.
on
The VHS is Dead
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· Score: 1
You're right that PVRs and DVD-Rs have yet to hit critical mass yet. For all Dixons have thrown the 40:1 ratio about these last few days about DVD players to VCRs, VHS still comfortably outsells its recordable competition.
What this is actually about is two things:
1) Dixons are attempting to beat their image of "only for idiots who can't shop online, or believe that their shop assistants know one end of an extension lead from the other", and promote themselves as meccas for the tech-savvy. Never going to happen, but they're trying. Saying "we're too modern for VHS" helps that.
2) Its not that no-one is buying VCRs, but that the margins are miniscule, thanks to competition from Tesco and Asda. They would much rather sell you a 700 quid DVD+HD PVR box (that will, in turn, be obsolete in two years when HD Sky launches) than a VCR that costs one twentieth of that.
I remember playing Quake II with half the cast of the X-Men present in the game - the idea of using player custom configuration to reproduce trademarked character designs is as old as modding.
This is a blatent attack designed to deal with the fact that no-one is interested any more in the (announced years ago) Marvel MMORPG game, because CoH does it all so well already.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod points, mod point, my Kingdom for some mod points. AC Gets It.
Intelligent Design isn't a theory. It's barely even a fucking hypothesis. "Some sort of Supreme Being, we don't know which, did it" is NOT a theory.
Does this mean Roblimo can then do another dupe?
Lego recently launched Quatro - double the size again, for kids too young even for Duplo. I'm definitely buying a boxful for my baby once he's old enough (there is enough Duplo and Lego still around from when I was tiny).
Both of those sound really rather interesting - I'll have to give them a go.
We've got the Lord Of The Rings Risk (and expansion set). That is also really good, as the Fellowship moves the Ring across the board, acting like a time limit with a random element (the Ring only moves on some die throws). Also, many of the borders between territories are mountains (necessary because Middle Earth is a single continent), but there are special cards you can play that can occasionally give you passage across them. You've got the Heroes thing from Godstorm, and fortresses too.
I've got four sets, yes.
However, the Original Trilogy Star Wars set was a monumental waste of money. I'm not exactly the biggest geek in the world, but anyone prepared to spend the kind of cash the nice "collectors edition" costs is going to know enough Star Wars to answer 90% of their questions without even thinking too hard.
We just use the nice pewter pieces and comedy R2 electronic die substitute with Genus questions.
Philips do a really nice looking one, with styling by Nike. Its all funky and orange, and I'd have one if only they weren't so damn short on space (I'd want at least a 1Gb one, but they're only 256Mb).
Aaah, I see the problem. I think the previous posters had assumed you were a student, not a teacher.
"DTS just sounds nicer 'cause it's usually twice that."
Unfortunately, I've not seen a proper 1536kbps DTS track in years; have there been recent ones I've missed, then? Its a pity; DTS laserdiscs are amazing.
Blimey. Make an Office Space reference, get two replies, and neither one of them apparently gets it. Strange things afoot at the Circle-S.
Sorry, that's the list of things to do if you had a million dollars, not before you die.
According to Amazon.co.uk, Play.com and every other UK retailer I've heard from, the UK's supply of new-size PS2s has sold out, and they weren't expecting volume quantities until January when I looked last week.
So a LOT of kids are getting XBoxes under the Christmas tree if Sony don't get a move on. The PSP is still in 'trendy hype-machine' mode, and not at mass-profit levels yet - those sales can wait more than PS2s can.
"Joe Average will buy one of 4-5 big brands without even knowing about all this region mess"
Except that my Toshiba is multi-region, so is my friend's Pioneer, and even another friend's Sony that they bought from the actual Sony shop.
Which big brand do you mean?
No, I think its fair to say that there will be a lot less of any Gentoo user running this machine...
"let's face it, they couldn't have screwed the pooch nearly as well with a non-MS based system."
You've clearly not had much experience of EDS. I dread to think how much damage they could cause let loose on Linux boxes.
"Not all of the violent games have a bad context, but it doesn't mean none of them have."
a) Well, exactly. Which is why you need to look at them properly to understand why GTA is more unsuitable for kids than Halo 2.
b) Actually playing the games would mean they wouldn't suggest that the new Prince Of Persia is one of the most suitable games of the year for kids, when the showers of gore you can achieve with your two-sword technique are far more impressive than anything I've seen in most of the games on the 'worst' list.
c) As much as people love to attack GTA for being a game where 'you beat up prostitutes', I managed to play every title in the series for a good 40+ hours each (apart from San Andreas, which I don't yet have) without doing so at all. The game merely reacts in an intelligent way to what you ask your character to do. Its up to you if you want to be such a horrible person; the main missions largely involve a lot of fast driving, and the killing is usually bunch of fellow criminals rather than random members of the public.
Do you really believe that all 110 episodes of B5 are not worth the purchase? The £40 per set is excellent value, if you ask me, for one of (if not the) best SF programs ever made.
If you only think its worth £20 for a 30-disc set, I'm surprised you have a DVD player at all.
I'm more amazed that he thinks movies caught on before TV. I was watching Buffy downloads back around series 4, and yet I've only once even considered downloading a film, and that was when I heard that the dual-layer Academy screeners of Lord Of The Rings looked slightly better than the commecial releases I already owned (thanks to less edge enhancement). Couldn't find them, by the way, so I've still never downloaded a film.
Does that still exist? Here in the UK I've only rarely seen a DVD player which has it enabled since about 2000. Seriously - I can get a multi-region player from Amazon or Asda (the UK subsidiary of Walmart), let alone specialist shops.
A big part of the problem is international sales. Between waiting a year to see them and watching the episodes get cut to shreds by idiot schedulers who can't get their head round the idea that "Fantasy != Aimed At 5-year-olds", loads of us in the UK downloaded Buffy and Angel while they were on.
Which means fewer people actually watching them on broadcast TV, and so the channel not being prepared to shell out much money for the rights to broadcast them.
The irony of all this is that we (the people who download episodes of things) are actually contributing to the dumbing down of television. When people watch "the good stuff" by downloading advert-free encodes, TV execs will be more interested in screening reality-show crap that gets watched by those who don't do such things.
Friday Night on Fox TV seems to be in a constant trap of advertising 12-episode box sets by only showing the first couple of them before switching to something else.
"Personally, I thank Interfaith for compiling this year's Christmas shopping list for me."
Sorry to disappoint you, then. One of the 10 'worst' games is Hitman: Blood Money. Not only have they not played it, however, but they've not seen anyone else play it, either - the game isn't finished yet and has a 2005 release date.
Unfortunately, persuading the developers to turn it into a church attendance sim at the last moment, just for comedy value, could be difficult.
Block the IM port on the router. Its a security-hole-ridden load of crap anyway. If they want to chat for hours online, at least make them use something less horrible.
If they're non-geeks, the 'oh dear, is the internet down?' excuse will put off the argument for a while, too!
Given that Asda have DVD-Recorders around £200 in the UK now, I think the only question is about whether there will even be any play-only machines around by the time Blu-Ray and HD-DVD start duking it out to be the one stomping on the DVD player's corpse.
You're right that PVRs and DVD-Rs have yet to hit critical mass yet. For all Dixons have thrown the 40:1 ratio about these last few days about DVD players to VCRs, VHS still comfortably outsells its recordable competition.
What this is actually about is two things:
1) Dixons are attempting to beat their image of "only for idiots who can't shop online, or believe that their shop assistants know one end of an extension lead from the other", and promote themselves as meccas for the tech-savvy. Never going to happen, but they're trying. Saying "we're too modern for VHS" helps that.
2) Its not that no-one is buying VCRs, but that the margins are miniscule, thanks to competition from Tesco and Asda. They would much rather sell you a 700 quid DVD+HD PVR box (that will, in turn, be obsolete in two years when HD Sky launches) than a VCR that costs one twentieth of that.
I remember playing Quake II with half the cast of the X-Men present in the game - the idea of using player custom configuration to reproduce trademarked character designs is as old as modding.
This is a blatent attack designed to deal with the fact that no-one is interested any more in the (announced years ago) Marvel MMORPG game, because CoH does it all so well already.