Nope, it was definitely an 05 release. Everyone seems to have forgotten about it, shame really. Forza Motorsport felt like a lame imitation by comparison (though admittedly it wasn't hugely better than GT3). Gamespot entirely missed it in their Best of 05 as well.
Yeah, but eleven of the sixteen games you mentioned are sequels, which was kind of the point of TFA. Sure, they might be good games in their own right (and most of them are), but a lot of them were criticised for being too similar to their predecessors. Particularly Gran Turismo 4, Quake 4, and Burnout Revenge.
How many of the games you listed are truly innovative, or do something that we haven't seen before?
If you don't need character included in your shot, you could also grab the WoW map viewer from www.curse-gaming.com. It reads the map info from the MPQ file and allows you to fly around the entire world on your local machine. AFAIK it's not outlawed by Blizzard, but I wouldn't recommend running it while trying to play.
I'm fairly sure that here in Australia, carriers do indeed keep copies of SMS messages routed through their servers. Since the messages are of trivial size, it hardly costs anything to keep them around temporarily. For example, last week in the lead up to the riots at Cronulla beach (which you may have heard of), there were a couple of text messages circulating urging people to show up at a certain time & place to "reclaim our beach".
The police have indicated that it will be trivially easy to find who originally sent the messages, indicating to me that they are kept on file, at least in the short term.
Counter-Strike implemented this about four years ago. It's called spectator mode, and you have the option of taking the first person view from any particular player, a free-moving camera, or a top down "god's eye" view showing the map and relative position of each player. There was also stuff like picture-in-picture if you wanted to mix and match. This mode was activated every time you got killed.
There was also the option of connecting to a server purely as a spectator, and then being able to re-broadcast the stream. This was only ever used in high-profile clan matches and tournaments. I haven't played CS in years so I don't know how it's developed since then, but it wasn't all that great. Sure it was OK while you were dead and waiting for the next round, but to actually connect to a server and watch a tournament final? No thanks, I'd rather be playing.
Funnily enough, just this week Blizzard announced a new Parental Access Control for WoW. Little Johnny's parents can now set particular times and dates when he's allowed to access his WoW account, and when he isn't. It's doubtful many parents will actually use it (or how many kids won't be able to guess their parents' password), but at least the adding of this functionality shows Blizzard is listening.
Would it have helped in this situation? Probably not, but it's a step in the right direction.
Same here in Australia. The only people I know with AIM accounts are Americans I used to play an online game with. Basically everyone uses MSN Messenger.
3. Informing others or the press about the time you were taken to Turkey to be tortured.
4. Knowing the reason why you were taken to Turkey to be tortured.
Guess what? The anti-terror laws currently being debated in the Australian parliament (like Congress, but rowdier) include almost precisely these clauses. If you get arrested on suspicion of terrorist offences, you are allowed *one* phone call to a family member to indicate that you are safe. You're not allowed to tell them where you are, what you've been charged with, or even what you've done wrong (as the law also allows the police throw people in jail for up to two weeks without charge or due process). Further, if your family member happens to mention to anyone else (including the media) that you've been arrested for terrorist offences, they can go to jail for up to five years!! Same goes for the journalist who publishes your story, five years jail!
My Nokia 6600 could do all of that and more, and I've had it nearly two years now. The Bluetooth support isn't fantastic, but I get the impression it's better than the RAZR's. Not to mention it runs Symbian Series 6 OS, which gives me a massive variety of applications and/or games to download and run.
Sure, it's nowhere near as nice looking as the RAZR, but meh. It's hidden in my pocket most of the time. And besides, I'm not the sort of person that would flash it around in the expectation that others will be impressed (not suggesting anyone else here is either!).
It's not just the Chinese servers that are region limited. I'm pretty sure you need a local CD key to play on the European or Korean servers as well. However, the list of servers you see is literally just a text file sitting on your hard drive. So realistically you can connect to any WoW server you want (including the illegal emulated ones), but I'd be surprised if a European WoW server accepted your US login credentials (or vice-versa). YMMV.
I think the segregation of servers is more for cultural and language reasons than anything technical. Managing a 40-man MC raid (or even just partying with 5 people for the Deadmines) would be pretty difficult if only half the players spoke English!
It's called the Hero's Journey (also known as the monomyth). Essentially there's only two types of stories: the Hero's Journey and the Ritual Occasion.
I'm on their ADSL2 plan as well, advertised at 12Mbit. I'm connected to the Glebe exchange in central Sydney, but can only seem to sync at speeds around 4-5Mbit. When attached to multiple fast torrents, I've seen the line peak at around 500k/s, though 200-300k/s is much more common. I can comfortably upload at up to 100k/s before it really starts affecting the downstream though:)
I'm sick of Europe being the last target market (ie. getting the PSP last, Nintendos handhelds last etc)
You should try living in Australia then! Notice how our release date is "early 2006"? That means March at the earliest. And it's like that for pretty much everything. Hell, the PSP was only released in Australia on September 1. Yes, that's right. Six weeks ago tomorrow.
Reading your comment reminded me of the late prophet Bill Hicks' spiel about advertising:
[Bill Hicks]:
By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they'll take root, I don't know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there's no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan's little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good. Seriously, no, this is not a joke. "There's gonna be a joke coming..." There's no fucking joke coming, you are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourselves, it's the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself.
I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too. "Oh, you know what Bill's doing? He's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market. He's very smart." Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking evil scumbags.
"You know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar, that's a big dollar, a lot of people are feeling that indignation, we've done research, huge market. He's doing a good thing." Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scumbags, quit putting a godamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet.
I haven't bought a DVD player for several years, but back in about 2001 when I bought mine, region-free DVD players were definitely legal. Back then, the player needed to be unlocked, but most manufacturers have instructions for doing this on their websites. If that was unavailable, the retailer could usually help you with the unlocking code.
Not quite. Nova 969 (in Sydney anyway, not sure about other markets) has a community-based broadcasting license, which means they're *not allowed* to broadcast more than two advertisements in a row. It's a condition of their license. It definitely helps them though, I can stand sitting through one minute of commercials, rather than the 10 minute blocks you get on other stations.
Your other point, however, about them being able to run more commercials than other stations simply isn't true. As with commercial television, there is a hard limit on the number of minutes that can be devoted to advertising per hour. And, just like every other station, Nova will aim as close to this mark as they can get. If you actually counted the amount of time spent on advertising, you'd find that Nova spend pretty much the same amount as any other station. Despite what they say on air.
Nope, sorry, been there done that, bought the t-shirt. I bought Guild Wars in the expectation that it would pull me away from WoW. Guess which one I'm still playing nightly, and which one sits in an un-used corner of my HDD?
How many large academic institutions do you think would be happy to have crocodiles running around? Or perhaps the research centre is backed by a large (unnamed) academic institution!
Don't be so quick to assume that things must be wrong because they seem unusual to you.
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Nope, it was definitely an 05 release. Everyone seems to have forgotten about it, shame really. Forza Motorsport felt like a lame imitation by comparison (though admittedly it wasn't hugely better than GT3). Gamespot entirely missed it in their Best of 05 as well.
where exactly is murder legal or tolerated?
Here's a short list.
Yeah, but eleven of the sixteen games you mentioned are sequels, which was kind of the point of TFA. Sure, they might be good games in their own right (and most of them are), but a lot of them were criticised for being too similar to their predecessors. Particularly Gran Turismo 4, Quake 4, and Burnout Revenge.
How many of the games you listed are truly innovative, or do something that we haven't seen before?
If you don't need character included in your shot, you could also grab the WoW map viewer from www.curse-gaming.com. It reads the map info from the MPQ file and allows you to fly around the entire world on your local machine. AFAIK it's not outlawed by Blizzard, but I wouldn't recommend running it while trying to play.
I'm fairly sure that here in Australia, carriers do indeed keep copies of SMS messages routed through their servers. Since the messages are of trivial size, it hardly costs anything to keep them around temporarily. For example, last week in the lead up to the riots at Cronulla beach (which you may have heard of), there were a couple of text messages circulating urging people to show up at a certain time & place to "reclaim our beach".
The police have indicated that it will be trivially easy to find who originally sent the messages, indicating to me that they are kept on file, at least in the short term.
Soulseek is good for finding obscure music as well.
Every time I see this quote, I'm reminded of this Despair Inc poster.
Counter-Strike implemented this about four years ago. It's called spectator mode, and you have the option of taking the first person view from any particular player, a free-moving camera, or a top down "god's eye" view showing the map and relative position of each player. There was also stuff like picture-in-picture if you wanted to mix and match. This mode was activated every time you got killed.
There was also the option of connecting to a server purely as a spectator, and then being able to re-broadcast the stream. This was only ever used in high-profile clan matches and tournaments. I haven't played CS in years so I don't know how it's developed since then, but it wasn't all that great. Sure it was OK while you were dead and waiting for the next round, but to actually connect to a server and watch a tournament final? No thanks, I'd rather be playing.
Funnily enough, just this week Blizzard announced a new Parental Access Control for WoW. Little Johnny's parents can now set particular times and dates when he's allowed to access his WoW account, and when he isn't. It's doubtful many parents will actually use it (or how many kids won't be able to guess their parents' password), but at least the adding of this functionality shows Blizzard is listening.
Would it have helped in this situation? Probably not, but it's a step in the right direction.
Same here in Australia. The only people I know with AIM accounts are Americans I used to play an online game with. Basically everyone uses MSN Messenger.
You'll probably appreciate this picture then :)
3. Informing others or the press about the time you were taken to Turkey to be tortured.
:-/
4. Knowing the reason why you were taken to Turkey to be tortured.
Guess what? The anti-terror laws currently being debated in the Australian parliament (like Congress, but rowdier) include almost precisely these clauses. If you get arrested on suspicion of terrorist offences, you are allowed *one* phone call to a family member to indicate that you are safe. You're not allowed to tell them where you are, what you've been charged with, or even what you've done wrong (as the law also allows the police throw people in jail for up to two weeks without charge or due process). Further, if your family member happens to mention to anyone else (including the media) that you've been arrested for terrorist offences, they can go to jail for up to five years!! Same goes for the journalist who publishes your story, five years jail!
Welcome to the brave new world
My Nokia 6600 could do all of that and more, and I've had it nearly two years now. The Bluetooth support isn't fantastic, but I get the impression it's better than the RAZR's. Not to mention it runs Symbian Series 6 OS, which gives me a massive variety of applications and/or games to download and run.
Sure, it's nowhere near as nice looking as the RAZR, but meh. It's hidden in my pocket most of the time. And besides, I'm not the sort of person that would flash it around in the expectation that others will be impressed (not suggesting anyone else here is either!).
It's not just the Chinese servers that are region limited. I'm pretty sure you need a local CD key to play on the European or Korean servers as well. However, the list of servers you see is literally just a text file sitting on your hard drive. So realistically you can connect to any WoW server you want (including the illegal emulated ones), but I'd be surprised if a European WoW server accepted your US login credentials (or vice-versa). YMMV.
I think the segregation of servers is more for cultural and language reasons than anything technical. Managing a 40-man MC raid (or even just partying with 5 people for the Deadmines) would be pretty difficult if only half the players spoke English!
You're thinking of the Hero's Journey story type. Fits like a glove over pretty much any Hollywood movie you can care to name.
It's called the Hero's Journey (also known as the monomyth). Essentially there's only two types of stories: the Hero's Journey and the Ritual Occasion.
Aparently you didn't either, the word the OP mis-spelt was "consistently" ;)
I'm on their ADSL2 plan as well, advertised at 12Mbit. I'm connected to the Glebe exchange in central Sydney, but can only seem to sync at speeds around 4-5Mbit. When attached to multiple fast torrents, I've seen the line peak at around 500k/s, though 200-300k/s is much more common. I can comfortably upload at up to 100k/s before it really starts affecting the downstream though :)
Whatever happened to reading a book?
Funnily enough, I have an ebook reader on my Nokia 6600.
I'm sick of Europe being the last target market (ie. getting the PSP last, Nintendos handhelds last etc)
You should try living in Australia then! Notice how our release date is "early 2006"? That means March at the earliest. And it's like that for pretty much everything. Hell, the PSP was only released in Australia on September 1. Yes, that's right. Six weeks ago tomorrow.
Reading your comment reminded me of the late prophet Bill Hicks' spiel about advertising:
[Bill Hicks]:
By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they'll take root, I don't know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there's no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan's little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good. Seriously, no, this is not a joke. "There's gonna be a joke coming..." There's no fucking joke coming, you are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourselves, it's the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself.
I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too. "Oh, you know what Bill's doing? He's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market. He's very smart." Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking evil scumbags.
"You know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar, that's a big dollar, a lot of people are feeling that indignation, we've done research, huge market. He's doing a good thing." Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scumbags, quit putting a godamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet.
Amen.
I haven't bought a DVD player for several years, but back in about 2001 when I bought mine, region-free DVD players were definitely legal. Back then, the player needed to be unlocked, but most manufacturers have instructions for doing this on their websites. If that was unavailable, the retailer could usually help you with the unlocking code.
Not quite. Nova 969 (in Sydney anyway, not sure about other markets) has a community-based broadcasting license, which means they're *not allowed* to broadcast more than two advertisements in a row. It's a condition of their license. It definitely helps them though, I can stand sitting through one minute of commercials, rather than the 10 minute blocks you get on other stations.
Your other point, however, about them being able to run more commercials than other stations simply isn't true. As with commercial television, there is a hard limit on the number of minutes that can be devoted to advertising per hour. And, just like every other station, Nova will aim as close to this mark as they can get. If you actually counted the amount of time spent on advertising, you'd find that Nova spend pretty much the same amount as any other station. Despite what they say on air.
Nope, sorry, been there done that, bought the t-shirt. I bought Guild Wars in the expectation that it would pull me away from WoW. Guess which one I'm still playing nightly, and which one sits in an un-used corner of my HDD?
How many large academic institutions do you think would be happy to have crocodiles running around? Or perhaps the research centre is backed by a large (unnamed) academic institution!
Don't be so quick to assume that things must be wrong because they seem unusual to you.