Into an online massive world, where you strive to be a gang leader / mafia leader / etc against other real players. Think GTA:SA Gang Wars, but with real people, real gangs, real gang members.
Yeah, gang == MMORPG guild, deal with it.
You could be a hick gang leader in the boonies. You could run a business pimping, or selling drugs/etc.
Of course, the car is the central point. Getting cars will be harder, none of this 'run up and get car' business. You'll need to learn how to do it. You'll start off on a bike, try to join a gang... eventually get a car, you've got to look after it, or you'll lose it in an accident.
Oh god, no! Even the minimal RPG elements in San Andreas got annoying. You're just cruising around, having fun, side-slipping a helicopter along San Fiero beach and scything down sunbathers with the rotor blades... then the 'You are feeling hungry' message pops up. Great, now I need to break off from the carnage to find food. I have to do that in real life, thanks - I don't need it in a game! What's next, if you don't sleep for eight hours of every 24 in game time you start hallucinating then pass out?
And the idea of GTA featuring Grinding(TM) before I can even drive a damn car would be a surefire way of deterring me from ever playing it. Grinding and boss battles... two things that modern games way over-use.
these images of Muhammad are as offensive to muslims as it would be to christians to depict the Virgin Mary getting fucked by a pig with the caption "Technically, she's still a virgin."
So become an atheist or (if, like me, you're a lazy Gen-Xer and can't be bothered to commit to any particular belief) an agnostic. That way you won't give a shit about any offensive religious imagery!
1977: Craig Thomas writes Firefox
1982: Clint Eastwood directs and stars in Firefox
1983: Craig Thomas writes Firefox Down
2004: 'You must think in Russian!' jokes [as seen below] swarm the internet.
There may also have been mention of some internet browser, but that hardly seems relevant...
The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."
It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA.
In other news: NASA announces that per Presidential order, its new sole mandate is 'to carry men closer to the heavens, that they may touch the face of their Creator'.
So, can we expect just another two years of this creeping stupidity and madness... or another six? Or ten? Or...
You mean the Lee Tamahori who was just arrested for prostitution? (He wasn't trying to hire a prostitute, he was the prostitute!) His Hollywood standing might be slightly negatively impacted by this...
By coincidence, I bought my first new (as opposed to second-hand) game in probably over a year today - Resident Evil 4 for PS2. But the only reason I bought it was that Game had marked it down to 20 quid. Which happens to be about the most I'm willing to pay for a second-hand game.
That's clearly the 'invisible hand' of the market at work right there. As the price drops, the sales rise - basic economics. But at the same time, Shadow The Hedgehog was right next to RE4 at the same price - but I wouldn't even have bought that if it had been a fiver.
So what I conclude from this is that A: games are overpriced, and B: crap games are really overpriced. Seriously, though, I wouldn't pay the 50 quid asking price for an Xbox 360 game even if the console came free with a packet of cornflakes. It would need to be as life-consuming as crack to be worth that much money.
If he's the same Colin Campbell who once dissed me in (now defunct) UK videogames trade weekly CTW, then I can say with authority that all his opinions are 100% wrong. Go booth babes!:p
In some ways it's not that different than trying to make a nuclear hand gernade. They may have had them in Starship Troopers but they don't exist in the real world and there's no way to make one with current understanding of physics.
Besides, the thing that really bugs me in movies are in panning or action sequences where the camera isn't fast enough and everything becomes blurry.
That's down to a fundamental limitation of movies that nobody (in Hollywood or the tech world) wants to address, a real elephant in the room situation - everything's geared to shooting at 24 frames per second. Not only are movies shot on film at 24FPS, but even the new HD cameras used by people like George Lucas and Robert Rodriguez work at 24FPS as well!
No matter what resolution of HD the next-generation discs display, they're still going to be encoded from 24FPS originals. So it doesn't matter how much detail you can see - as soon as things start moving in your super new Blu-Ray or HD-DVD movie, you're still going to get blurs on live-action and that irritating clipping/strobing effect whenever people move too quickly in front of a greenscreened background. 24FPS is about the lowest a film can be projected and not get visible strobing between frames, and was originally chosen (as with so many things) for financial reasons - the more frames per second are shown, the more film is needed, and film costs money. So it's always been a 'just barely good enough' system.
If they'd really wanted to make the ultimate leap in visual quality, the HD backers would have pushed for an increase in framerate as well as resolution. The 60FPS Showscan projection system devised by Douglas Trumbull back in the early 80s supposedly exceeds the human eye's maximum 'refresh rate' and as a result looks far more 'real' than anything else - including 24FPS cinema projection, which is being held up as some kind of gold standard for how HD should look.
But that wouldn't help improve the look of anything shot in 24FPS, so no 'old' films (ie, anything ever made) would benefit. And Hollywood would never make such a radical (and expensive) change to their working methods in order to provide 60FPS material either. So I guess we're stuck with 24FPS movies until someone invents the holodeck.
I used to be a game journo (editor, in fact) some seven or eight years ago, and I'm *so* glad I got out of it when I did. As the smaller developers were snapped up by the giants, dealing with the publishers became more and more unpleasant.
I always at least tried to be honest with game reviews - if I thought something stank, I said so (I think the lowest review score - as the final percentage rating - I ever gave was 3%), and while previews had to be more informative than opinionated, I generally took the piss a bit if the game deserved it. There's only so many cutsey platform game previews a man can write without going mad.
Problem was, not only did certain publishers throw shit-fits and threaten to withhold future games if they got bad reviews (or sometimes actually go through with the threat: there was a period of about six months where my mag had to buy games by one publisher - fuck it, it was Ocean - because they wouldn't send us code), but as time went by they also started getting nasty about previews as well. Basically, they wanted their press releases to be reprinted, including the captions they'd written for the screenshots. Er, no. Not going to happen. So the PRs would go over my head and threaten to pull advertising - not just from my mag, but from other titles as well. Fun fun fun.
Since things were only going to get worse as the publishers ate each other and got more powerful, I decided to get out as soon as I got the chance.
There are some mags whose editorial policies I still respect - Edge, PC Zone, GamesTM - but many of the rest have fallen into the 'exclusive cover/fawning preview/minimum review score of 85%' routine/trap because it's the path of least resistance to ensure they can get product to cover.
(And I was never offered a free holiday in return for a good score. Bastards!)
Seriously, that thing looks bulkier than the Pioneer combined LD/DVD player I owned seven or eight years back - and that had to be big to fit the 12" LDs. What's Toshiba's excuse now?
Don't be surprised if this IBook is the first to ship without a FireWire port.
Which instantly eliminates one of the big USPs of the whole iLife suite - that you can import, edit and burn your own movies. Without Firewire, how are you supposed to get the data off your digital camcorder? (Do many camcorders support USB 2.0 yet?) And what about all those people (like me) who have their data backed up on Firewire external drives? What are they supposed to do, transfer it on Zip discs when they upgrade?
Hell, Apple invented Firewire, so it's not like they have to pay a per-unit royalty to have one somewhere on the machine.
My 2000 Graphite iBook is (fingers crossed) still going strong, despite having been most of the way round the world with me in a rucksack. Technically it wouldn't qualify as part of this test as it's running 9.2 rather than OS X, but hey.
It's by far the most reliable Mac I've ever owned/used. I think in the last year it's needed one reboot, and that was because I did a force-quit when if I'd been patient I could have quit from within the application, and the Finder freaked. The only issues I've had are that the battery life has dropped over time (inevitable), and the backlight on the screen isn't nearly as bright as it used to be (probably inevitable) - and the keyboard isn't as responsive either, with 'i' and 'e' of course being the letters that need a harder prod to be sure of registering. Apart from that it's been great - in fact, it works a hell of a lot better with my laser printer than my brand-new Tiger desktop. Kind of ironic (and annoying), as the desktop was meant in part to be a print station. Why the fuck can't I print more than 20 pages at a time on my Epson EPL-5900L through OS X without it just giving up and sitting there for no reason?
Anyway, my old 'toilet seat' iBook rules. Of course, now that I've said this I'll probably knock it off the table or spill coffee on it tomorrow!
I'm genuinely curious about this. I have an Xbox (original flavour). Right now, I have no interest in getting a 360 because the software lineup does nothing for me, but that's beside the point.
What I'm interested in is: if you don't want (or can't access) Live, then is it even worth getting a 360 at all? From TFA, the whole 360 experience seems to be focused on Live from the first time you power up, right down to needing a Passport account. Frankly, I have zero interest in playing against other people online, or buying skins, or getting Gamer Tags or custom icons, or any of that. But since the games appear to revolve around exactly that kind of thing on Live, would it basically mean throwing money away on a game that I'd never see half of?
Read James Bamford's awesome book 'Body Of Secrets', or do a Google search for the deliberately loosely-worded text of United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18). NSA is already eavesdropping on every email it can find. USSID 18 not only allows NSA to keep copies of any emails (or anything else, including phone calls) it intercepts via the Echelon programme (for a year in the case of emails to a US citizen from a US citizen, for four years in the case of emails to or from a US citizen to a non-US citizen, or indefinitely in any other case) if an NSA analyst decides they're of possible foreign intelligence value. Meaning they have to be examined by NSA analysts to determine if there's any FORINT value in the first place! If the Echelon computers flag an email for any reason, it will be read.
If that wasn't enough, anything that NSA isn't legally allowed to intercept can be picked up by any of NSA's partners in the UKUSA programme - primarily GCHQ in the UK, but also its counterparts in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and forwarded to NSA. Because these intercepts weren't technically made by NSA, they get to keep them indefinitely. Pretty sneaky, huh?
Oh, and if NSA 'just happens' to come across something in an email that suggests a possible criminal act within the United States, then they're required to turn it over to the appropriate law enforcement authority - police, FBI, Secret Service, Homeland Security, whoever - for investigation.
In short, if you're doing something dodgy, don't use email to plan it!
I'm pretty sure that in terms of market share in the UK, the ZX-81 whomped all competition (TRS-80, Atom, VIC-20) in the early 1980s, and the ZX Spectrum outsold the C64 and the BBC Micro by quite a margin for the first few years of its life simply because it was so much cheaper than either. Macs and PCs barely made a dent even in the business market until the late 1980s simply because they were so damn expensive!
...then I guess I won't be buying one, because I have *zero* interest in playing games online. Effectively, I'd be paying 50 quid for a game that I would never play half of - no thanks! Unless they sell cut-down versions of the game without the online component for half the price... but somehow, I doubt that'll be happening.
Is "Online! Online! Online!" Allard's version of a Ballmer rant? And why's he always 'J' Allard? Does he have an embarrassing first name?
...but now I do - a load of bullshit marketing-speak!
Still, as long as it's not a world where every site is some Flash-laden excrescence that claims to offer 'a rich user experience' while trying to sell me things I don't need rather than, you know, actual useful information...
So, you're going to try to single-handedly start a boycott right during the Christmas shopping season, when all the kids are begging their parents for the PS3
Another perk is that it completely bypasses the region coding on my Mac's DVD drive. Use Apple DVD Player? Limited number of region changes before it locks permanently. Use VLC? Plays whatever DVD I want from any part of the world. And I can get screencaps from it with the usual Apple-3/4 key combo, as opposed to having to use SnapzPro or whatever as with Apple's player.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, gang == MMORPG guild, deal with it.
You could be a hick gang leader in the boonies. You could run a business pimping, or selling drugs/etc.
Of course, the car is the central point. Getting cars will be harder, none of this 'run up and get car' business. You'll need to learn how to do it. You'll start off on a bike, try to join a gang ... eventually get a car, you've got to look after it, or you'll lose it in an accident.
Oh god, no! Even the minimal RPG elements in San Andreas got annoying. You're just cruising around, having fun, side-slipping a helicopter along San Fiero beach and scything down sunbathers with the rotor blades... then the 'You are feeling hungry' message pops up. Great, now I need to break off from the carnage to find food. I have to do that in real life, thanks - I don't need it in a game! What's next, if you don't sleep for eight hours of every 24 in game time you start hallucinating then pass out?
And the idea of GTA featuring Grinding(TM) before I can even drive a damn car would be a surefire way of deterring me from ever playing it. Grinding and boss battles... two things that modern games way over-use.
So become an atheist or (if, like me, you're a lazy Gen-Xer and can't be bothered to commit to any particular belief) an agnostic. That way you won't give a shit about any offensive religious imagery!
1982: Clint Eastwood directs and stars in Firefox
1983: Craig Thomas writes Firefox Down
2004: 'You must think in Russian!' jokes [as seen below] swarm the internet.
There may also have been mention of some internet browser, but that hardly seems relevant...
It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA.
In other news: NASA announces that per Presidential order, its new sole mandate is 'to carry men closer to the heavens, that they may touch the face of their Creator'.
So, can we expect just another two years of this creeping stupidity and madness... or another six? Or ten? Or...
You mean the Lee Tamahori who was just arrested for prostitution? (He wasn't trying to hire a prostitute, he was the prostitute!) His Hollywood standing might be slightly negatively impacted by this...
That's clearly the 'invisible hand' of the market at work right there. As the price drops, the sales rise - basic economics. But at the same time, Shadow The Hedgehog was right next to RE4 at the same price - but I wouldn't even have bought that if it had been a fiver.
So what I conclude from this is that A: games are overpriced, and B: crap games are really overpriced. Seriously, though, I wouldn't pay the 50 quid asking price for an Xbox 360 game even if the console came free with a packet of cornflakes. It would need to be as life-consuming as crack to be worth that much money.
What with Celebrity Big Brother, the Crazy Frog and chav culture, I'm amazed it's that few!
I produced a gut the old-fashioned way, with beer.
If he's the same Colin Campbell who once dissed me in (now defunct) UK videogames trade weekly CTW, then I can say with authority that all his opinions are 100% wrong. Go booth babes! :p
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle motion!
They weren't so much hand grenades as bazooka shells. And on that note... M-388 Davy Crockett tactical nuclear recoilless rifle
That's down to a fundamental limitation of movies that nobody (in Hollywood or the tech world) wants to address, a real elephant in the room situation - everything's geared to shooting at 24 frames per second. Not only are movies shot on film at 24FPS, but even the new HD cameras used by people like George Lucas and Robert Rodriguez work at 24FPS as well!
No matter what resolution of HD the next-generation discs display, they're still going to be encoded from 24FPS originals. So it doesn't matter how much detail you can see - as soon as things start moving in your super new Blu-Ray or HD-DVD movie, you're still going to get blurs on live-action and that irritating clipping/strobing effect whenever people move too quickly in front of a greenscreened background. 24FPS is about the lowest a film can be projected and not get visible strobing between frames, and was originally chosen (as with so many things) for financial reasons - the more frames per second are shown, the more film is needed, and film costs money. So it's always been a 'just barely good enough' system.
If they'd really wanted to make the ultimate leap in visual quality, the HD backers would have pushed for an increase in framerate as well as resolution. The 60FPS Showscan projection system devised by Douglas Trumbull back in the early 80s supposedly exceeds the human eye's maximum 'refresh rate' and as a result looks far more 'real' than anything else - including 24FPS cinema projection, which is being held up as some kind of gold standard for how HD should look.
But that wouldn't help improve the look of anything shot in 24FPS, so no 'old' films (ie, anything ever made) would benefit. And Hollywood would never make such a radical (and expensive) change to their working methods in order to provide 60FPS material either. So I guess we're stuck with 24FPS movies until someone invents the holodeck.
I always at least tried to be honest with game reviews - if I thought something stank, I said so (I think the lowest review score - as the final percentage rating - I ever gave was 3%), and while previews had to be more informative than opinionated, I generally took the piss a bit if the game deserved it. There's only so many cutsey platform game previews a man can write without going mad.
Problem was, not only did certain publishers throw shit-fits and threaten to withhold future games if they got bad reviews (or sometimes actually go through with the threat: there was a period of about six months where my mag had to buy games by one publisher - fuck it, it was Ocean - because they wouldn't send us code), but as time went by they also started getting nasty about previews as well. Basically, they wanted their press releases to be reprinted, including the captions they'd written for the screenshots. Er, no. Not going to happen. So the PRs would go over my head and threaten to pull advertising - not just from my mag, but from other titles as well. Fun fun fun.
Since things were only going to get worse as the publishers ate each other and got more powerful, I decided to get out as soon as I got the chance.
There are some mags whose editorial policies I still respect - Edge, PC Zone, GamesTM - but many of the rest have fallen into the 'exclusive cover/fawning preview/minimum review score of 85%' routine/trap because it's the path of least resistance to ensure they can get product to cover.
(And I was never offered a free holiday in return for a good score. Bastards!)
Seriously, that thing looks bulkier than the Pioneer combined LD/DVD player I owned seven or eight years back - and that had to be big to fit the 12" LDs. What's Toshiba's excuse now?
Don't be surprised if this IBook is the first to ship without a FireWire port.
Which instantly eliminates one of the big USPs of the whole iLife suite - that you can import, edit and burn your own movies. Without Firewire, how are you supposed to get the data off your digital camcorder? (Do many camcorders support USB 2.0 yet?) And what about all those people (like me) who have their data backed up on Firewire external drives? What are they supposed to do, transfer it on Zip discs when they upgrade?
Hell, Apple invented Firewire, so it's not like they have to pay a per-unit royalty to have one somewhere on the machine.
It's by far the most reliable Mac I've ever owned/used. I think in the last year it's needed one reboot, and that was because I did a force-quit when if I'd been patient I could have quit from within the application, and the Finder freaked. The only issues I've had are that the battery life has dropped over time (inevitable), and the backlight on the screen isn't nearly as bright as it used to be (probably inevitable) - and the keyboard isn't as responsive either, with 'i' and 'e' of course being the letters that need a harder prod to be sure of registering. Apart from that it's been great - in fact, it works a hell of a lot better with my laser printer than my brand-new Tiger desktop. Kind of ironic (and annoying), as the desktop was meant in part to be a print station. Why the fuck can't I print more than 20 pages at a time on my Epson EPL-5900L through OS X without it just giving up and sitting there for no reason?
Anyway, my old 'toilet seat' iBook rules. Of course, now that I've said this I'll probably knock it off the table or spill coffee on it tomorrow!
What I'm interested in is: if you don't want (or can't access) Live, then is it even worth getting a 360 at all? From TFA, the whole 360 experience seems to be focused on Live from the first time you power up, right down to needing a Passport account. Frankly, I have zero interest in playing against other people online, or buying skins, or getting Gamer Tags or custom icons, or any of that. But since the games appear to revolve around exactly that kind of thing on Live, would it basically mean throwing money away on a game that I'd never see half of?
If that wasn't enough, anything that NSA isn't legally allowed to intercept can be picked up by any of NSA's partners in the UKUSA programme - primarily GCHQ in the UK, but also its counterparts in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and forwarded to NSA. Because these intercepts weren't technically made by NSA, they get to keep them indefinitely. Pretty sneaky, huh?
Oh, and if NSA 'just happens' to come across something in an email that suggests a possible criminal act within the United States, then they're required to turn it over to the appropriate law enforcement authority - police, FBI, Secret Service, Homeland Security, whoever - for investigation.
In short, if you're doing something dodgy, don't use email to plan it!
I'm pretty sure that in terms of market share in the UK, the ZX-81 whomped all competition (TRS-80, Atom, VIC-20) in the early 1980s, and the ZX Spectrum outsold the C64 and the BBC Micro by quite a margin for the first few years of its life simply because it was so much cheaper than either. Macs and PCs barely made a dent even in the business market until the late 1980s simply because they were so damn expensive!
Is "Online! Online! Online!" Allard's version of a Ballmer rant? And why's he always 'J' Allard? Does he have an embarrassing first name?
If the mice get too smart, no problem - we can just send in the rat brain-controlled F-22s to wipe them out with an airstrike!
Still, as long as it's not a world where every site is some Flash-laden excrescence that claims to offer 'a rich user experience' while trying to sell me things I don't need rather than, you know, actual useful information...
BZZZZT! Disqualified! Argument automatically lost!
(In a perfect world, anyway...)
Wait, the PS3 is out? Has anyone told Microsoft?
Another perk is that it completely bypasses the region coding on my Mac's DVD drive. Use Apple DVD Player? Limited number of region changes before it locks permanently. Use VLC? Plays whatever DVD I want from any part of the world. And I can get screencaps from it with the usual Apple-3/4 key combo, as opposed to having to use SnapzPro or whatever as with Apple's player.