Mobloging - only for the interesting
on
Camera Phone Tips
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· Score: 4, Funny
I got in on this a few months ago. I was suddenly struck by the simplistic charm of being able to share anything you see, any time you want, with 6 billion captivated viewers.
So I fired up the old web-o-matic and cranked out an interface to allow me to upload pics and blogs with minimal effort. Bingo! Time to let the hits roll in...
Shortly after putting it on the site, I realised that nothing remotely interesting happened in my life that was worth uploading and sharing with the world.
I never came face to face with a yeti. Never saw a UFO. Never witnessed a daring bank heist. Never so much as saw a woodland animal doing a cute thing with a peice of bread.
I'm now contemplating taking the moblog bit off, because it only serves to highlight to myself how deeply unexciting my life is.
You're dead right. I think people are confusing "sequels" with "remakes".
A sequel in the modern sense is not a "Jet Set Willy 2" rehasing of exactly the same game but with a few extra rooms, but a continuation of a series.
It works in the same way as long running literary series - I find myself looking forward to a new Dark Tower novel, or a Jack Ryan story in the same way that I'm anticipating Half Life 2, UT2k4 or any of the other quality franchises out there. Sequels can move a series on, can provide new insights and offer a deeper gaming experience in a familiar world. Did people cry about the death of creativity when Agatha Christie produced *yet another* Hercule Poirot novel?
Of course, this doesn't always hold true - the Tomb Raider series springs to mind - but then tastes vary.
Aw hell, who cares that most of what is on the internet is stuff and nonesense? Not I. True, Blogs tend to be tedious, self-indulgent twaddle. In more enlightened times, they would have been kept under mattress, lock and key and never revealed to the world. But thats doesn't mean there is no value in them.
I keep a website. It's not a blog. It's just a... website. It's pure self-indulgence. I write about... stuff. It goes largely ignored by most denizens of the net. But there is a small subset of people from all over the globe, that visit regularly. And sometimes, if the fancy takes them, they'll contribute and comment. How amazing is that? To have an audience for your thoughts and ramblings, on an international scale!
I tend to fall into the camp where I'd like to see things moving before I lay down my money. I can certainly remember times in which I've been looking forward to a game, and then been warned off it by playing a demo: Deus Ex 2 springs instantly to mind.
I also think that its possible for a demo to become a memorable gaming experience in and of itself. Some standouts:
Civilization (Atari ST): A limited demo that ran from the start to 0 AD. No limits to what you could do in the time. I must've played this nonstop for months, trying desperately to get just one step more advanced before it timed out.
Unreal Tournament (PC): Jeez, I've never been so blown away by demo level than I was by Mobious in this demo. Played online and off for weeks.
Far Cry (PC): Was fairly nonplussed by the build up to this game, but the demo fair blew me away. So much detail, so much to see and do. So many ways to accomplish your objective. And it looks lovely.
Well, thats put the kibosh on that one then. As an emusic subscriber, I was very vocal about how good the service was. It was the kind of offering that I'd been looking for since I first installed Napster all those years ago.
It had a wide range of music, offered high quality encodings and even allowed you to chose your file naming policy. Even better, it was legit and allowed you to feel as if you were working with with the music industry rather than against it.
Of course, on first inspection, the new sub of 40 tracks for 10 dollars seems poor only in comparison to the old (nearly) unlimited service. Up against iTunes et al, 25 cents per song seems like top value for money. But Emusic isn't the same kind of thing. Emusic was a browser's paradise... download an album here, a track there, give them a listen and if you didn't like it, delete and move on. You've lost nothing, the artist has been credited, all is well. After the initial download frenzy of the first few weeks, I found I'd download maybe 20 or 30 albums a month, of which maybe 4 or 5 would be keepers. It gave me a chance to look around genres or artists I'd never heard of, or would never consider risking money on.
But not anymore. Who is going to be experimental in their downloads if every download counts? I can see this being a death knell for Emusic unless they radically revamp their artist catalogue. In fact, thinking about it, it looks as though they're purposefully trying to kill it? Or at the very least, reboot it with different artists and a different userbase.
Oh well, I've submitted my cancellation. And till the end of my subscription I'm going to leech for all I'm worth, in complete disrespect of their 2000 song limit. Sod em.
So we think we know a little about space eh? Well answer me this Eisenstein... The astrologers in their ivory towers tell us that space is a vacuum, no air right? So how in the name of Mike does the Sun keep burning? How? HOW??
We need to land manned spaceships on the surface of the sun to answer this question, and maybe take that self-satisfied smirk off the faces of the astromonkeys!
Phew... what a stinking turd Valve have laid on us. My attempts to "upgrade" my perfectly operational HL/CS installation has led to me now having two completely broken games. Steam is a hideous Frankenstein's Monster of a delivery mechanism, that only a mother could love. It locks up, goes quiet for hours on end, fails to keep you informed about what it's doing, crashes, doesn't terminate properly, hogs resources and ultimately, doesn't let you play any games.
I wonder if I can get a refund for a five year old game?;)
Even more worrying is the fact that Steam has informed me that my HL key entitles me to one month free subscription. Erm, hold on? What does this mean? After the one month (by which time I might just have a working game again) I have to pay to play HL/CS? It doesn't say as much, but it also doesn't suggest otherwise.
Bums I tells ya! No-good cads and bums, the lot of 'em.
Lets hope this trend continues in Europe. I used to buy loads of CDs back in my salad days at university, mostly in 3 for 20 quid sales in HMV. But I'll be buggered if I'm paying the going rate for new albums in the UK. 15 quid is common place these days for a new release. I tried to buy a copy of David Gray's White Ladder last week for the wife... 17 quid in all the larger stores. So I cocked a snook at those bums and got it for 10 quid on amazon.
Of course, I'm also signed up to Emusic, which delivers me a couple of hundred legal albums a month for a mere tenner. Its not chart material, admittedly, but I've found more good stuff on there than in 10 years of thumbing through commerical artists in HMV.
At the current album prices, I see little reason to continue buying CDs alongside my Emusic downloads - much as I like the feel of something tangible in my hands. But a drop to 10 quid an album (say) might justify having the two buying methods coexisting again.
Having used the spam filtering built in to Mozilla for the last six months, I can testify to its effectiveness. In very little time at all, I'd trained it to send 95% of the filth to the spam directory and avoid doing the same for 95% of good mails. For me, not having to run a "middle man" piece of software was a real boon.
However, my life isn't totally spam free, as I find that I become neurotic about those 5% false positives that get unhelpfully moved to the spam directory, so still end up having to sift through the grot every once in a while. On the plus side, I now have a solution to my tiny cock problem, I've arranged cheaper home insurance and I have the email address of several horny co-eds who I'm assured are hungry for man juice.
Fair enough, the guy was distributing copyright material. He done bad, he should be slapped on the wrists. But prison? Are American prisons really so spacious that you need to fill them up petty, almost victimless crimes like these?
When I was a young 'un, my mother used to cure the embarrassing problem of wool-bobbles on clothes by wrapping a hand in inverted adhesive tape (sticky side out) and running it bruskly over the surface of the affected garment. These days, the rise of the mighty Remmington Fuzzaway (tm) has largely rendered this practise useless.
I believe however, in consultation with my mother, that this might still be applied to the above problem. I propose a giant space hand, sheathed in cellotape and waved liberally about in orbit would be the best method.
This takes me back to when I was young and full of piss and vinegar. Had myself a distressingly modified A1200 in a tower case with more processing power and RAM than an Amiga was meant to hold - not to mention a big fat fan tied to the gfx card that somehow caused the case to vibrate like a washing machine. That was when computing was done by real men - I sustained numerous minor fleshwounds and a deep fear of hacksaws when I shoehorned that pesky motherboard into my tower case! I still maintain to this day that a computer isn't truely yours till you've bled on the motherboard and smelled the sweet sweet aroma of silicon and burning blood...
One of the more attractive features of this painful experience, apart from the surge of testosterone, was that the bitch could run Shapeshifter, a software Mac emu that was better* than the real thing! I used to spend more time in SS than in AmigaOS, mostly to play with Civ 2, but also because of the joy that the "Eep!" sound effect brought to my traumatised mind. Ahhh.
Happy days...
* - by "better" I mean "slower, unless viewed through the eyes of an advocate, in which case I mean "faster".
I've discovered that its far preferable to run a Shoutcast server from home and stream 128kbit MP3s to my station at work. With a little bit of SSH jiggery and pokery I can get over the blocked port and have access to my full collection of 300+ albums. No need to sully the corporate machines at all.
On the time wasting issue - yesterday, for some unfathomable reason, I couldn't connect to the Stream. Rather than increasing productivity, I found that the absence of music in my working life caused me to become a jibbering wreck. I spent most of the morning frantically trying to debug the problem, and the afternoon planning how I would investigate it when I got home. Music helps me to shut out the monotony and concentrate on the work.
In the immortal words of the Tavares - Don't Take Away The Music!
Thats pretty cool. I just hope that porn sites start rewarding regular viewers with a Health Plan. Then maybe I'd be able to do something about my rapidly deteriorating eyesight!
Its a shame that the author is having so much trouble with his Palm, since I've found them to be very reliable and resiliant, not to mention indespensible. I've had my Vx for 18 months now, bought it on a kind of a whim since my memory was good enough that I had never felt the need for a datebook or diary before.
It turned out that I soon found the Vx to be much more than these things, and it has gradually wormed its way into my everyday routine that I reckon I would swim naked across pirhanna infested waters with raw pork tied to my manhood to avoid it ever failing on me.
I keep my accounts on it. I plan my future finances on a small spreadsheet. I keep my multitude of passwords, pins and usernames under 128bit encryption. I have a couple of EBooks to hand for long train journeys (read the whole of the Night's Dawn trilogy on various tube journeys). I retrieve my mail and idle on IRC. I've even coded up a little pda version of my webpage that I can access to queue up mp3s on my shoutcast server from anywhere in the house.
In short, its had heavy usage and so far, touch wood, no failures. In fact, as disposible income worries are now lifting, I'm looking to replace it with a quicker, smarter, better model. On with colour and ethernet capabilities. Any recommendations?
There is already an early DivX player for the XBox. It's fairly limited at the moment I believe - no sound, DivX 3.0 only, no 4 or 5 - but its a start. Sorry, don't have a link, I saw this on a mailing list and the post in question is stranded on my work computer. Doh!
Personally, I'd buy an xbox tomorrow if I could get a decent DivX player, an MP3 player and a version of MAME, all of which could get at my movies/tunes/roms across the LAN. That would be a fairly nice piece of plastic to have sitting underneath your TV.
I could think of a million uses for a brigade of these little blighters. Have one permanently streaming my shoutcast station wired up to every stereo in the house, one sitting by the TV with my 5Gb of MAME roms and a proper arcade joystick, one next to it to play Divxs on...
Provided its done right, and doesnt change the story, this might be a good thing. It will help to seamlessly blend the two trilogies without the glaring continuity problems that will inevitably crop up. A quick scene to explain why no one recognises the droids (maybe Owen Larrs confiding that he thinks they look familiar when he buys them, but dismissing it that when you've seen one R2 unit you've seen them all) or some shots of Jimmy Smits on Alderon just before this shit hits the fan might do wonders for interlinking two stories that were clearly not very well thought out to begin with.
Of course, this is with the proviso that he offers the originals AS WAS and UNTOUCHED on the DVDs, and that the extra scenes are simply an optional extra.
Yeah, the more I think about it, the more things like that come back to me and the more factors of a thousand crop up to haunt me. Example: 250 quid for a 120Mb hard drive in 1994. Compared to an 80Gb hard drive for 90 quid in 2002.
And I'm still running at about 10% free space at any one time!
Hell, it makes you feel old when 512Mb is being bandied around as the standard memory size. I remember getting all excited about a 512k(!!) trapdoor expansion for my Amiga, for which I paid 100 quid for.
Oh yeah, and this whole website was fields back then... far as the eye could see.;)
Here in the UK, the Cable company Telewest seems to have the worst telephone support I've ever encountered. A couple of weeks ago, I phoned up with a query about network outages and if there was any reason why my connection was dead.
The monkey I got handed to proceeded to deny that there was anything wrong with the network, and launched into his heavily trained diagnosis routine. He first did the usual routine of asking me to power cycle the modem. I duely did this and reported that the modem was coming back, send light flashing...
And before I could go any further, he'd cut me off and said that the lights flashing were a sign that the modem was faulty and that I would require a tech visit. Before I could interject and tell him that it was only rebooting, he'd began the proceedure of booking me an appointment.
So I told him to calm down and wait for a second. Sure enough, the modem completed its reboot. I then asked him to go away and seriously check if the network was buggered. Sure enough, two minutes later, he came back and sheepishly told me that connections in the Wimbledon area were suffering.
It seems that Telewest support chimps will book a tech visit at the slightest provocation. I wonder how much time has been wasted, both in terms of tech hours and people having to take the day off?
... Episode 1 was shit so the kids stayed away from Episode 2.
Police Academy 6 didn't do so good at the box-office, but I would suspect that the reasons for this are more to do with the legacy of past mistakes than the lack of love, loss, conflict and fantasy.
Hmmm... I remember when music in games was a huge thing. For me, the sole reason for wanting to buy a spectrum 128k over my perfectly adequate rubber keyed chum was the presence of the mighty sound chip (which sounds somewhat lacklustre in retrospect). Ahhhh, I still remember humming the tune to Spectrum Tetris for months on end! Arcades were yet another step up... C&VG once gave away a cassette (remember them, kids?) with the musics from Outrun and 720 arcade machines. Man, I must've to that tape till it broke! ("Skate or Dieeee!")
Its not the same anymore... While I can happily hum the tune to Saboteur or Where Time Stood Still (from 15 years ago), I couldnt for the life of me tell you how the score of Medal Of Honour went (from 15 days ago!).
Music is now just one of those things in videogames. Shame really.
Slashdot Mirror
I got in on this a few months ago. I was suddenly struck by the simplistic charm of being able to share anything you see, any time you want, with 6 billion captivated viewers.
So I fired up the old web-o-matic and cranked out an interface to allow me to upload pics and blogs with minimal effort. Bingo! Time to let the hits roll in...
Shortly after putting it on the site, I realised that nothing remotely interesting happened in my life that was worth uploading and sharing with the world.
I never came face to face with a yeti. Never saw a UFO. Never witnessed a daring bank heist. Never so much as saw a woodland animal doing a cute thing with a peice of bread.
I'm now contemplating taking the moblog bit off, because it only serves to highlight to myself how deeply unexciting my life is.
Bah!
You're dead right. I think people are confusing "sequels" with "remakes".
A sequel in the modern sense is not a "Jet Set Willy 2" rehasing of exactly the same game but with a few extra rooms, but a continuation of a series.
It works in the same way as long running literary series - I find myself looking forward to a new Dark Tower novel, or a Jack Ryan story in the same way that I'm anticipating Half Life 2, UT2k4 or any of the other quality franchises out there. Sequels can move a series on, can provide new insights and offer a deeper gaming experience in a familiar world. Did people cry about the death of creativity when Agatha Christie produced *yet another* Hercule Poirot novel?
Of course, this doesn't always hold true - the Tomb Raider series springs to mind - but then tastes vary.
Aw hell, who cares that most of what is on the internet is stuff and nonesense? Not I. True, Blogs tend to be tedious, self-indulgent twaddle. In more enlightened times, they would have been kept under mattress, lock and key and never revealed to the world. But thats doesn't mean there is no value in them.
... website. It's pure self-indulgence. I write about ... stuff. It goes largely ignored by most denizens of the net. But there is a small subset of people from all over the globe, that visit regularly. And sometimes, if the fancy takes them, they'll contribute and comment. How amazing is that? To have an audience for your thoughts and ramblings, on an international scale!
I keep a website. It's not a blog. It's just a
What an amazing world we live in!
I tend to fall into the camp where I'd like to see things moving before I lay down my money. I can certainly remember times in which I've been looking forward to a game, and then been warned off it by playing a demo: Deus Ex 2 springs instantly to mind.
I also think that its possible for a demo to become a memorable gaming experience in and of itself. Some standouts:
Civilization (Atari ST): A limited demo that ran from the start to 0 AD. No limits to what you could do in the time. I must've played this nonstop for months, trying desperately to get just one step more advanced before it timed out.
Unreal Tournament (PC): Jeez, I've never been so blown away by demo level than I was by Mobious in this demo. Played online and off for weeks.
Far Cry (PC): Was fairly nonplussed by the build up to this game, but the demo fair blew me away. So much detail, so much to see and do. So many ways to accomplish your objective. And it looks lovely.
Well, thats put the kibosh on that one then. As an emusic subscriber, I was very vocal about how good the service was. It was the kind of offering that I'd been looking for since I first installed Napster all those years ago.
It had a wide range of music, offered high quality encodings and even allowed you to chose your file naming policy. Even better, it was legit and allowed you to feel as if you were working with with the music industry rather than against it.
Of course, on first inspection, the new sub of 40 tracks for 10 dollars seems poor only in comparison to the old (nearly) unlimited service. Up against iTunes et al, 25 cents per song seems like top value for money. But Emusic isn't the same kind of thing. Emusic was a browser's paradise... download an album here, a track there, give them a listen and if you didn't like it, delete and move on. You've lost nothing, the artist has been credited, all is well. After the initial download frenzy of the first few weeks, I found I'd download maybe 20 or 30 albums a month, of which maybe 4 or 5 would be keepers. It gave me a chance to look around genres or artists I'd never heard of, or would never consider risking money on.
But not anymore. Who is going to be experimental in their downloads if every download counts? I can see this being a death knell for Emusic unless they radically revamp their artist catalogue. In fact, thinking about it, it looks as though they're purposefully trying to kill it? Or at the very least, reboot it with different artists and a different userbase.
Oh well, I've submitted my cancellation. And till the end of my subscription I'm going to leech for all I'm worth, in complete disrespect of their 2000 song limit. Sod em.
So we think we know a little about space eh? Well answer me this Eisenstein... The astrologers in their ivory towers tell us that space is a vacuum, no air right? So how in the name of Mike does the Sun keep burning? How? HOW??
We need to land manned spaceships on the surface of the sun to answer this question, and maybe take that self-satisfied smirk off the faces of the astromonkeys!
Phew... what a stinking turd Valve have laid on us. My attempts to "upgrade" my perfectly operational HL/CS installation has led to me now having two completely broken games. Steam is a hideous Frankenstein's Monster of a delivery mechanism, that only a mother could love. It locks up, goes quiet for hours on end, fails to keep you informed about what it's doing, crashes, doesn't terminate properly, hogs resources and ultimately, doesn't let you play any games.
;)
I wonder if I can get a refund for a five year old game?
Even more worrying is the fact that Steam has informed me that my HL key entitles me to one month free subscription. Erm, hold on? What does this mean? After the one month (by which time I might just have a working game again) I have to pay to play HL/CS? It doesn't say as much, but it also doesn't suggest otherwise.
Bums I tells ya! No-good cads and bums, the lot of 'em.
Lets hope this trend continues in Europe. I used to buy loads of CDs back in my salad days at university, mostly in 3 for 20 quid sales in HMV. But I'll be buggered if I'm paying the going rate for new albums in the UK. 15 quid is common place these days for a new release. I tried to buy a copy of David Gray's White Ladder last week for the wife... 17 quid in all the larger stores. So I cocked a snook at those bums and got it for 10 quid on amazon.
Of course, I'm also signed up to Emusic, which delivers me a couple of hundred legal albums a month for a mere tenner. Its not chart material, admittedly, but I've found more good stuff on there than in 10 years of thumbing through commerical artists in HMV.
At the current album prices, I see little reason to continue buying CDs alongside my Emusic downloads - much as I like the feel of something tangible in my hands. But a drop to 10 quid an album (say) might justify having the two buying methods coexisting again.
Having used the spam filtering built in to Mozilla for the last six months, I can testify to its effectiveness. In very little time at all, I'd trained it to send 95% of the filth to the spam directory and avoid doing the same for 95% of good mails. For me, not having to run a "middle man" piece of software was a real boon.
However, my life isn't totally spam free, as I find that I become neurotic about those 5% false positives that get unhelpfully moved to the spam directory, so still end up having to sift through the grot every once in a while. On the plus side, I now have a solution to my tiny cock problem, I've arranged cheaper home insurance and I have the email address of several horny co-eds who I'm assured are hungry for man juice.
Fair enough, the guy was distributing copyright material. He done bad, he should be slapped on the wrists. But prison? Are American prisons really so spacious that you need to fill them up petty, almost victimless crimes like these?
Pointless.
When I was a young 'un, my mother used to cure the embarrassing problem of wool-bobbles on clothes by wrapping a hand in inverted adhesive tape (sticky side out) and running it bruskly over the surface of the affected garment. These days, the rise of the mighty Remmington Fuzzaway (tm) has largely rendered this practise useless.
I believe however, in consultation with my mother, that this might still be applied to the above problem. I propose a giant space hand, sheathed in cellotape and waved liberally about in orbit would be the best method.
This takes me back to when I was young and full of piss and vinegar. Had myself a distressingly modified A1200 in a tower case with more processing power and RAM than an Amiga was meant to hold - not to mention a big fat fan tied to the gfx card that somehow caused the case to vibrate like a washing machine. That was when computing was done by real men - I sustained numerous minor fleshwounds and a deep fear of hacksaws when I shoehorned that pesky motherboard into my tower case! I still maintain to this day that a computer isn't truely yours till you've bled on the motherboard and smelled the sweet sweet aroma of silicon and burning blood...
One of the more attractive features of this painful experience, apart from the surge of testosterone, was that the bitch could run Shapeshifter, a software Mac emu that was better* than the real thing! I used to spend more time in SS than in AmigaOS, mostly to play with Civ 2, but also because of the joy that the "Eep!" sound effect brought to my traumatised mind. Ahhh.
Happy days...
* - by "better" I mean "slower, unless viewed through the eyes of an advocate, in which case I mean "faster".
I've discovered that its far preferable to run a Shoutcast server from home and stream 128kbit MP3s to my station at work. With a little bit of SSH jiggery and pokery I can get over the blocked port and have access to my full collection of 300+ albums. No need to sully the corporate machines at all.
On the time wasting issue - yesterday, for some unfathomable reason, I couldn't connect to the Stream. Rather than increasing productivity, I found that the absence of music in my working life caused me to become a jibbering wreck. I spent most of the morning frantically trying to debug the problem, and the afternoon planning how I would investigate it when I got home. Music helps me to shut out the monotony and concentrate on the work.
In the immortal words of the Tavares - Don't Take Away The Music!
Boffin: Lets run through those results...
Egghead: Test 1 - Watching TV while lying on back. No adverse physical side-effects.
Boffin: Test 2 - Drinking beer while lying on back. No adverse physical side-effects.
Egghead: Test 3 - Disposing of body's waste gases while lying on back. No adverse physical side-effects.
Boffin: We conclude that these human males are perfectly suited to weightlessness.
Thats pretty cool. I just hope that porn sites start rewarding regular viewers with a Health Plan. Then maybe I'd be able to do something about my rapidly deteriorating eyesight!
So the universe is a giant computer eh?
Well, judging by the murky grey industrialised panorama I see from looking out of my window, I would say that it desperately needs a new videocard!
Its a shame that the author is having so much trouble with his Palm, since I've found them to be very reliable and resiliant, not to mention indespensible. I've had my Vx for 18 months now, bought it on a kind of a whim since my memory was good enough that I had never felt the need for a datebook or diary before.
It turned out that I soon found the Vx to be much more than these things, and it has gradually wormed its way into my everyday routine that I reckon I would swim naked across pirhanna infested waters with raw pork tied to my manhood to avoid it ever failing on me.
I keep my accounts on it. I plan my future finances on a small spreadsheet. I keep my multitude of passwords, pins and usernames under 128bit encryption. I have a couple of EBooks to hand for long train journeys (read the whole of the Night's Dawn trilogy on various tube journeys). I retrieve my mail and idle on IRC. I've even coded up a little pda version of my webpage that I can access to queue up mp3s on my shoutcast server from anywhere in the house.
In short, its had heavy usage and so far, touch wood, no failures. In fact, as disposible income worries are now lifting, I'm looking to replace it with a quicker, smarter, better model. On with colour and ethernet capabilities. Any recommendations?
There is already an early DivX player for the XBox. It's fairly limited at the moment I believe - no sound, DivX 3.0 only, no 4 or 5 - but its a start. Sorry, don't have a link, I saw this on a mailing list and the post in question is stranded on my work computer. Doh!
Personally, I'd buy an xbox tomorrow if I could get a decent DivX player, an MP3 player and a version of MAME, all of which could get at my movies/tunes/roms across the LAN. That would be a fairly nice piece of plastic to have sitting underneath your TV.
I could think of a million uses for a brigade of these little blighters. Have one permanently streaming my shoutcast station wired up to every stereo in the house, one sitting by the TV with my 5Gb of MAME roms and a proper arcade joystick, one next to it to play Divxs on...
Ahhhh...
Provided its done right, and doesnt change the story, this might be a good thing. It will help to seamlessly blend the two trilogies without the glaring continuity problems that will inevitably crop up. A quick scene to explain why no one recognises the droids (maybe Owen Larrs confiding that he thinks they look familiar when he buys them, but dismissing it that when you've seen one R2 unit you've seen them all) or some shots of Jimmy Smits on Alderon just before this shit hits the fan might do wonders for interlinking two stories that were clearly not very well thought out to begin with.
Of course, this is with the proviso that he offers the originals AS WAS and UNTOUCHED on the DVDs, and that the extra scenes are simply an optional extra.
Yeah, the more I think about it, the more things like that come back to me and the more factors of a thousand crop up to haunt me. Example: 250 quid for a 120Mb hard drive in 1994. Compared to an 80Gb hard drive for 90 quid in 2002.
And I'm still running at about 10% free space at any one time!
Hell, it makes you feel old when 512Mb is being bandied around as the standard memory size. I remember getting all excited about a 512k(!!) trapdoor expansion for my Amiga, for which I paid 100 quid for.
;)
Oh yeah, and this whole website was fields back then... far as the eye could see.
Here in the UK, the Cable company Telewest seems to have the worst telephone support I've ever encountered. A couple of weeks ago, I phoned up with a query about network outages and if there was any reason why my connection was dead.
The monkey I got handed to proceeded to deny that there was anything wrong with the network, and launched into his heavily trained diagnosis routine. He first did the usual routine of asking me to power cycle the modem. I duely did this and reported that the modem was coming back, send light flashing...
And before I could go any further, he'd cut me off and said that the lights flashing were a sign that the modem was faulty and that I would require a tech visit. Before I could interject and tell him that it was only rebooting, he'd began the proceedure of booking me an appointment.
So I told him to calm down and wait for a second. Sure enough, the modem completed its reboot. I then asked him to go away and seriously check if the network was buggered. Sure enough, two minutes later, he came back and sheepishly told me that connections in the Wimbledon area were suffering.
It seems that Telewest support chimps will book a tech visit at the slightest provocation. I wonder how much time has been wasted, both in terms of tech hours and people having to take the day off?
... Episode 1 was shit so the kids stayed away from Episode 2.
Police Academy 6 didn't do so good at the box-office, but I would suspect that the reasons for this are more to do with the legacy of past mistakes than the lack of love, loss, conflict and fantasy.
Hmmm... I remember when music in games was a huge thing. For me, the sole reason for wanting to buy a spectrum 128k over my perfectly adequate rubber keyed chum was the presence of the mighty sound chip (which sounds somewhat lacklustre in retrospect). Ahhhh, I still remember humming the tune to Spectrum Tetris for months on end! Arcades were yet another step up... C&VG once gave away a cassette (remember them, kids?) with the musics from Outrun and 720 arcade machines. Man, I must've to that tape till it broke! ("Skate or Dieeee!")
Its not the same anymore... While I can happily hum the tune to Saboteur or Where Time Stood Still (from 15 years ago), I couldnt for the life of me tell you how the score of Medal Of Honour went (from 15 days ago!).
Music is now just one of those things in videogames. Shame really.