Glen Hoddle was a good coach - tactically speaking he was by far the most gifted English manager in recent memory; he even made Southampton play good football for heaven's sake. Unfortunately he was/is let down by his inability to get along with players and his nut job religious beliefs. If he'd been blessed with a personality that didn't curdle milk he could have been the greatest England manager ever.
Sadly however he'll go down in history as a gifted player and a brilliant tactician who made Gazza cry and hated disabled people.
I was referring to the Sega Master System not the BBC Master! How would anyone be able to concentrate on crushing freedom of expression when there was Elite to be played?
I'm not overly concerned if the monitoring is to be done by a Master System. It only has a Z80 processor, which is hardly ideal for facial recognition - "Thought Crime Detected! Identifying perpetrator, please wait three weeks".
Rubbish - we'd just import cheap labour from elsewhere in the world to take their place. Morality aside there is basically no limit to supply of unskilled labour. Admittedly there's a long lead time for each unit but producing them requires no skill and no capital. Compare that to the manufacture of industrial robots which requires large amounts of expensive material, a hugely expensive production centre and a relatively rare skillset.
Fear of fraud, fear of terrorism, fear of anything is not a reason to give up the right to walk freely in your own country without having to identify yourself to officers of the state. Anyone who is willing to do so is an idiot and/or a coward.
The Government has proven itself to be untrustworthy and down right malicious on countless occasions; why would any sane person trust them with a database containing biometric information on every person in the country?
The Aquarius had a butchered version of Microsoft BASIC, though you were somewhat limited with what you could do with it as it had about 2K of usable memory. I also wrote my first code at 6, on the venerable Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ with a mighty 48K of RAM (though 8K of that was for the screen). Sadly I was lumbered with Sinclair BASIC which was possibly the least sophisticated programming language in history.
Agreed (though it was called "UFO: Enemy Unknown" in the UK) - I must have changed between Disk 2 (the globe) and Disk 6 (the missions) about a thousand times, I'm suprised my brother's Amiga 1200 stood up to it.
It's only my second favourite though; nothing can touch the Acorn Archimedes version of Elite. The best version of the best game ever written. It was breathtakingly awesome at the time, and still holds up well today.
On the consoles it has to be Super Mario Kart on the SNES. None of the sequels have surpassed it, though I'm willing to concede that Mario 64 has the better Battle Mode.
We run the latest version of Sun's JVM and have had to disable concurrent garbage collection. Why? Because it was causing the JVM to shutdown without reporting an error; one second it would be running, the next it was gone. While concurrent garbage collection has obvious advantages, it is clear that Sun's implementation has a little way to go before it can be considered stable.
The international version of Winning Eleven, Pro Evolution Soccer, has never had licensed names. All the club and player names are either slightly misspelled or descriptive (e.g. Manchester United/City become Manchester Red/Blue respectively). This doesn't appear to have hurt its sales in the UK as it often tops the best seller charts. Why? Because it is much better game than FIFA; it actually plays like football rather than some "extreme" pastiche of the game.
It doesn't matter to me (or many others if the charts are to be believed) that the names aren't spot on. Everyone knows who they're referring to, the player models look like they misspelled name sakes and have the relevant strengths/weaknesses. What matters is the game - not that I get to play the "Barclays FA Premier League" rather than the "English Premier Division".
It doesn't in Canada or Australia, and it didn't in the UK while it was officially on sale here. However it does in the US - which is why I spend a not insignificant amount of money buying the imported variety from these people.
Without Woolly Mammoths to keep them in check the population of sabre-tooth arctic tigers will sky rocket! We won't be able to move without tripping over hungry, carnivorous, tundral mammals. Unless we act now to save the mammoths we're doomed! Doomed I tell you!
The BBC tests are not IQ tests, they are a combination of basic reasoning and knowledge of popular culture. If the tests required a decent level of intelligence to answer they'd alienate most of the British population, something that goes against their mantra of "accessibility". Contrary to popular belief the BBC is not exactly a bastion of the intelligentsia, like all publicly funded organisations its tolerance for stupidly is boundless.
The BBC is nothing more than Fox News with nice accents and the occasional long word thrown in.
If the people writing these reviews possessed any modicum of ability they wouldn't need to use numerical scores. A well written review should tell you everything you need to know about the game that is required to make a purchasing decision.
All too often the content of the review and the score that accompanies it have nothing in common; the scores seem to be nothing but an over inflated fop to advertisers.
Take one of the few quality gaming magazines that still exists, say Edge, and compare it to an internet review site, say GamePro. Edge's reviews are well written, interesting and provided a good overview of the game's quality; the score is almost irrelevant. GamePro's "Fun Factor" is utterly arbitrary, biased towards the upper end of the scale and given pride of place on the page. Meanwhile their reviews are lacking in detail and obsess over utterly unimportant details.
A will happily base purchasing decisions on an Edge review; all GamePro reviews tell me is that their reviewers should find another job.
Platinum Hits isn't exactly a new idea---there have been budget reprint lines since at least the SNES.
There have been budget re-releases since the early 80's (possibly even before then). I remember picking up Outrun (for the ZX Spectrum no less) for 1.99 on re-release - it had cost 9.99 (how extortionate!) two years before.
What hasn't continued from the 8/16 bit home computer era are compilations. They used to be all the rage and a popular alternative to budget releases. Somewhere I've still got the two tape compilation containing Elite, Ace Combat, Starglider, Tetris and The Sentinel; four of the best games ever released (and Ace Combat) for less than ten pounds.
Even taking in to account inflation it shows how staggeringly over-priced PC and console games are these days.
It gets worse, look at his hand writing. I've seen eight year olds with better penmanship! I refuse to accept that this bloke (a 19 year old is not a child, even if they are retarded) is at college.
Actually it's the dublishers who take the hit. In all but the most rare cases they fund the development of the game, they handle the marketing and they set the wholesale price.
The developers (i.e. the creative folk) get money from the publisher to make the game and receive royalties per unit sold.
A publisher can't just sit on a game in the hope it will sell eventually. Retailers won't keep stocks of games that don't move - they'll send them back to the publisher who'll have to store them (which costs money) or destroy them (which negates any chance they had of making money of that unit). If a game doesn't sell at its original price then it's not a matter of waiting until the sales pick up; but shifting the units before the costs exceed any potential profit.
Except that in most of the UK's small towns it isn't 1% of teenager population that are the problem, it's nearer to 50%. They've been brought up without any attempt to discipline them and with an excessive focus on their "rights". As such they believe that they have the right to do anything and the right to assault anybody who tries to stop them.
I've witnessed a gang of kids being herded in to a Police van after being arrested for dropping concrete blocks on to a busy motorway. You've never seen a more angry bunch; they were livid that the Police had put an end to their little game. Their complaints alternated between "You can't do this!" and, comically, "I've got rights!". Sadly, despite attempting to murder a number of motorists, they were probably released with a caution.
Thanks to these poor, oppressed little dears the centre of many UK towns are no-go areas after 10pm. Anything that allows law abiding, tax paying citizens to protect their business from these little shits is to be applauded.
Holy shit. Congratulations on losing the pounds but, bloody hell! I'm over six feet tall and you weighed twice what I do now. I don't think it was a choice between slimming down or taking root in a chair, if you hadn't lost the weight you'd have been dead within a decade. It must have taken some serious work to shed 10 stone.
Apple Corp (which owns Apple Records) is a private company, owned by the remaining Beatles and the estates of the deceased ones. The company still owns various rights with regard to the Beatles' back catalogue. As such the (very wealthy) surviving members are unlikely to sell to a company they've been fighting with for two decades. There's no incentive (they are already loaded) and numerous drawbacks (such as the loss of publishing rights).
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I think Zico would sue!
Sadly however he'll go down in history as a gifted player and a brilliant tactician who made Gazza cry and hated disabled people.
Cry fowl? In response to their servers being seized they made chicken noises?
I was referring to the Sega Master System not the BBC Master! How would anyone be able to concentrate on crushing freedom of expression when there was Elite to be played?
I'm not overly concerned if the monitoring is to be done by a Master System. It only has a Z80 processor, which is hardly ideal for facial recognition - "Thought Crime Detected! Identifying perpetrator, please wait three weeks".
Rubbish - we'd just import cheap labour from elsewhere in the world to take their place. Morality aside there is basically no limit to supply of unskilled labour. Admittedly there's a long lead time for each unit but producing them requires no skill and no capital. Compare that to the manufacture of industrial robots which requires large amounts of expensive material, a hugely expensive production centre and a relatively rare skillset.
... and look how well that worked out for Sega! They the mighty giants of gaming hardware, bestriding the console world.
The Government has proven itself to be untrustworthy and down right malicious on countless occasions; why would any sane person trust them with a database containing biometric information on every person in the country?
The Aquarius had a butchered version of Microsoft BASIC, though you were somewhat limited with what you could do with it as it had about 2K of usable memory. I also wrote my first code at 6, on the venerable Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ with a mighty 48K of RAM (though 8K of that was for the screen). Sadly I was lumbered with Sinclair BASIC which was possibly the least sophisticated programming language in history.
It's only my second favourite though; nothing can touch the Acorn Archimedes version of Elite. The best version of the best game ever written. It was breathtakingly awesome at the time, and still holds up well today.
On the consoles it has to be Super Mario Kart on the SNES. None of the sequels have surpassed it, though I'm willing to concede that Mario 64 has the better Battle Mode.
We run the latest version of Sun's JVM and have had to disable concurrent garbage collection. Why? Because it was causing the JVM to shutdown without reporting an error; one second it would be running, the next it was gone. While concurrent garbage collection has obvious advantages, it is clear that Sun's implementation has a little way to go before it can be considered stable.
It doesn't matter to me (or many others if the charts are to be believed) that the names aren't spot on. Everyone knows who they're referring to, the player models look like they misspelled name sakes and have the relevant strengths/weaknesses. What matters is the game - not that I get to play the "Barclays FA Premier League" rather than the "English Premier Division".
It doesn't in Canada or Australia, and it didn't in the UK while it was officially on sale here. However it does in the US - which is why I spend a not insignificant amount of money buying the imported variety from these people.
Without Woolly Mammoths to keep them in check the population of sabre-tooth arctic tigers will sky rocket! We won't be able to move without tripping over hungry, carnivorous, tundral mammals. Unless we act now to save the mammoths we're doomed! Doomed I tell you!
Panic?
The BBC is nothing more than Fox News with nice accents and the occasional long word thrown in.
Take one of the few quality gaming magazines that still exists, say Edge, and compare it to an internet review site, say GamePro. Edge's reviews are well written, interesting and provided a good overview of the game's quality; the score is almost irrelevant. GamePro's "Fun Factor" is utterly arbitrary, biased towards the upper end of the scale and given pride of place on the page. Meanwhile their reviews are lacking in detail and obsess over utterly unimportant details.
A will happily base purchasing decisions on an Edge review; all GamePro reviews tell me is that their reviewers should find another job.
What hasn't continued from the 8/16 bit home computer era are compilations. They used to be all the rage and a popular alternative to budget releases. Somewhere I've still got the two tape compilation containing Elite, Ace Combat, Starglider, Tetris and The Sentinel; four of the best games ever released (and Ace Combat) for less than ten pounds.
Even taking in to account inflation it shows how staggeringly over-priced PC and console games are these days.
It gets worse, look at his hand writing. I've seen eight year olds with better penmanship! I refuse to accept that this bloke (a 19 year old is not a child, even if they are retarded) is at college.
Because Microsoft (like Sony and Nintendo) demand a license fee for each game released on their console. PC games incur no such cost.
A publisher can't just sit on a game in the hope it will sell eventually. Retailers won't keep stocks of games that don't move - they'll send them back to the publisher who'll have to store them (which costs money) or destroy them (which negates any chance they had of making money of that unit). If a game doesn't sell at its original price then it's not a matter of waiting until the sales pick up; but shifting the units before the costs exceed any potential profit.
I've witnessed a gang of kids being herded in to a Police van after being arrested for dropping concrete blocks on to a busy motorway. You've never seen a more angry bunch; they were livid that the Police had put an end to their little game. Their complaints alternated between "You can't do this!" and, comically, "I've got rights!". Sadly, despite attempting to murder a number of motorists, they were probably released with a caution.
Thanks to these poor, oppressed little dears the centre of many UK towns are no-go areas after 10pm. Anything that allows law abiding, tax paying citizens to protect their business from these little shits is to be applauded.
Apple Corp (which owns Apple Records) is a private company, owned by the remaining Beatles and the estates of the deceased ones. The company still owns various rights with regard to the Beatles' back catalogue. As such the (very wealthy) surviving members are unlikely to sell to a company they've been fighting with for two decades. There's no incentive (they are already loaded) and numerous drawbacks (such as the loss of publishing rights).