Liam

For Searto and Nothing Else? If it's on sale today, it'll do just fine. End of discussion. Fuck debating about it.

Steam is a required component of HL2 and other Valve releases, it was one of the earlier big release games that authenticated/downloaded online etc

Hows Route these days? I'd come down but I'm backat work on the second, bit of an odd night to have it on really

This is the Orange/Wannadoo Livebox, yeah? OK the annoying thing about these is you need to 'pair' with the device, and it sounds like you're not. Look on the back of the box, there's a "1" and "2" button. Off the top of my head, I think 1 initiates pairing -it could be 2, though. So hit 1 and try to connect. Once you're paired, you're good. I'm guessing that what happened is your mate factory reset the livebox, so you lost all paired connections. Sounds very likely. The livebox can be a bit of a headache

Word. They gayme peaked when 2tizzle called out Timestretch on the spoons

Delete this thread

I think it's only bad if there are exclusive titles that you can't play cos you own the "wrong" console. Competition forces prices down and also forces companies to compete in terms of features. I bet the 360 wouldn't have got DivX playback if Sony hadn't signed a deal to have it on the PS3, because not so long ago MS were saying it wasn't a priority (being the format of choice for pirates and all), yet they've implemented it ahead of Sony. Good points there. But with an emphasis strictly on games, I've always felt that almost without exception cross platform titles suffer as a result. Plus it drives development costs through the roof -but having said that, dev costs for todays consoles are already staggering

Sequence breaking is old as gaming itself. Metroid is the undisputed king of sequence breaking, there's a group of obsessives that try to finish the games on the lowest possible completion rating... some people can do it without picking up powerups that to any normal player would be completely indispensible; if you know how Metroid games progress you'll understand. Some people have done Super Metroid in something like 12% item completion. That's insane! SM is my favourite game of all time by the way... Patching for console games is pretty minimal AFAIK. And to be perfectly honest it'll never become endemic simply because the costs and complexity involved performing play tests all over again is huge. Mind you, there are games you wish they could have patched... remember when Tomb Raider 3 dropped and there was uproar cos the game was bugged in such a way that it couldn't be finished if you made a simple mistake? PC version got patched, console owners got shafted. As for online play... it's huge. I love it. There are just so many games that are, as you rightly point out, awesome to play with mates but frankly bare waste solo... fighting games, sport games, driving games, you know this. Online play doesn't compare with 'back to mine' but it's in a whole different league to even the best AI. And being able to play with distant mates is something else: me my bro and my sis have all lived a long way from each other for years now. We play games online on the regular, beats the shit out of the odd phone call here and there.

Multiple formats with damn near identical specs do nothing for the consumer amirite? Xbizzle and Piss have sold in roughly equal numbers and serve two very different purposes. Things look pretty balanced to me. More balanced than ever, if you ask me

http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/14/nintend...rogram-for-wii/ Has anyone heard anything so insane? Demand for a console over a year on still outstrips demand so heavily that they're effectively running preorders again. Does anyone remember the news reports six or seven months ago covering the fact that Nintendo was turning over more profit than Sony? Let me clarify that -not Sony Computer Entertainment -SONY. I'd imagine the situation must be pretty similar right now. I might go find out

Keyword bombing can and will get you blacklisted by Google. Don't believe me? It happened to BMW in '05.

Square Enix. I just don't know what to think of them. They've turned out some of the best games ever, yet also some of the most piss poor gash ever willingly visited upon the gaming public since Custers Revenge. That "It's a Wonderful Life", or whatever they're naming it for western audiences looks astonishing, I'll give them that. I get the feeling it's one of those games I'll get on friday and not put down until I have to go to work the following monday

Before you lubricate, clean all areas you want to lube with a mild alcohol like isopropyl. Pointless applying oil to layers of dust and dirt. It will strip the old lube off, though, so don't clean until you're ready to re-lube it.

I take it you're looking for a hifi amplifier rather than a full blown PA? The Cambridge Audio gear from Richer Sounds is hard to beat in bang for buck, especially at the budget end. I think the A1 is normally about a hundred quid and not half bad.

Diggs could have a point there. Nintendo been running max production since launch and stil people complain about shortages, same with the DS. Dont' expect much to change. Sony would have to sell half a million units more than Nintendo a month for a whole year to match the Wii's userbase. That figure is about the same for the 360 too (which runs roughly equal to the Wii for units shifted). The PS3 also has a terrible units sold to games sold ratio -for months after launch it was under 1.0! A significant chunk of the PS3's demographic took the plunge simply for a cheap BR player, I'm gonna guess that the same can be said now following the huge price slashes. The real story is will Sony shift more games? Actually -scratch that... the real question is will Sony get more games on the shelves.

So the remote is the same as the Windows Media Center one? The Media Center remote is one of the dopest things any windows user can buy. They're only twenty quid or something as well. You can program them to control all your other hardware too. Handy shit. Even comes with batteries.

We used to. This is about four or five years back, belonged to my old flatmate. There are a few things to bear in mind: * Bulb life. The bulbs cost a fucking fortune. Look up the prices for your chosen projector. Fine if you plan to watch the odd film on it, not so good for being on all day. When the bulb dies you could be a couple of hundred quid out of pocket! * Contrast. the images do look less than perfect in bright lighting. Do you sit around in the dark all the time? If so your money is probabbly best spent on a Warcraft subscription anyway * A surface to project onto. Look into it. There are plenty of DIY alternatives, but the truth is that if you're gonna spend a grip on a projector, you need to budget half as much again to get a decent screen. * Noise. Where can you put it? Is it gonna be right next to you and a constant pain with whirring fans? Even the best projectors can be quite noisy. Don't forget this. * Have you got space for it? If you stick in in a medium size room like we did, you'll have to put up with people getting in the way of the beam all the time. Don't let any of this put you off. Projectors pwn

I'm a bit of a PS3 hater, but I'd be easily swayed by good games. It's nice that they've finally got the promised updates through the door... the PSP media functions are pretty slick. But a year on and they're still not getting games on shelves. The massive price slashes seem more necissary than attractive. There's a blockbuster at the end of my road which has loads of second hand PS3's already. I'd get a 360. Almost bought one myself but holding off till after xmas when my bro can afford one too, then we can XBL together. There's more sick 360 games already than you could possibly have time to play, and certainly more than there will be on the PS3 for at least a couple of years I'm really tempted to walk into town and buy Mario Galaxies. Fuck this 'next gen' nonsense, give me some gameplay (why is the term 'next generation' applied??? Surely it's 'current generation'? Waste hype spin blah blah)

Fixed.

Werd, Sony got caught red handed fabricating PSP "fanblogs" a few months back too so you could be right

Yes but there's also also a spec for a 51GB HD-DVD, it's just not been used yet (ie no demand for a commercial DVD of that length yet). Barely a gnats cock difference between the two as a media, only major differences are HD is region free whereas BR players are screwed over with BD+ and rootkit firmware updating, and of course the contentious issue of actually fabricating BR diodes which remains costly and slow It's not an issue I care to debate at any great length, but that article has really incensed me. It's trash; opinion presented as fact, a lot of conjecture and downright lies. I just don't get what this guys motivation is

The specs for the two formats are virtually identical. Neither format is genuinely pulling ahead, Sony keep releasing very skewed statistics using quite carefully selected survey groups. There's so much bullshit in that article too, take this for example: What this prick conveniently forgets to mention is that Blu Ray was hacked within days of HD-DVD I honestly couldn't really give a fuck, I'm not hugely concerned with HD outside of the ease of computer connectivity and certainly not in stupid disc formats. The disc specifications are virtually identical, the only real difference is the shady as fuck BD+ implimentation on BluRay players which is probabbly going to be a right ballache down the line. I wish people would stop with all this BETA vs VHS bullshit. There was a difference back then -Beta was higher quality but could only tape 60mins; VHS was perfectly good but could do 3hrs. BR and HD are to all reasonable purposes the same fucking thing but unfortunately the media industry didn't see fit to give joe public a nice easy de-facto standard like CD or DVD, so we can all look forward to five years of this kind of nonsense, terrible adoption rates and confusion so I say fuck it and boycott the lot, these jackasses deserve dismal sales all round

Signed

Build one mate While you're at it, build a tvbgone http://www.ladyada.net/make/tvbgone/

What Deft said. Or: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder