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Comment Re:4chan might be down forever. (Score 5, Interesting) 710

4chan is a fine site if you're on the right boards. /m/ is probably the best Japanese robots resource on the Internet, /tg/ is an excellent resource for DMs to discuss their latest campaigns and have made enough contributions to various games that some of it has even leaked into official canon (Warhammer 40,000 for example).

While I agree -most- of 4chan is a shit hole, don't discount that it's many small communities under one banner. Everyone outside of /b/ hates /b/, people just think /b/ is 4chan, which is like saying the BNP is Britian.

Comment Re:Pub, social, dollars (Score 1) 439

I think you missed the entire point of the article. Multiplayer modes aren't always about being social (even the opposite at times). It's that fact that it can be difficult to justify buying a game without a good multiplayer component.

I loved Bayonetta but only played it for say 20 hours, where as in Halo Reach I have played for 58 hours since September and I'm still playing a couple of hours a week and having fun.

Multiplayer adds so much extra play time that it's some times hard to pick up a single player game when I know I'm buying something I will only play for 1/5th of what I would be playing something with it, or that I will rarely play at all because every time I log onto PSN/Xbox LIVE a friend will invite me to a party and go "Hey, lets play some Halo/CoD".

Comment Re:UK gov "sorry" = UK gov "we got caught" (Score 1) 309

There is no sense. Since Spitting image went off the air politicians here have had basically a get out of jail free card for everything short of killing babies.

They have a sense of entitlement to their jobs and half of them have never spent more than a couple of hours in any area they're supposed to represent, instead just jump on top of the latest news story and hope to ride it as far as possible.

Comment GW (Score 3, Informative) 174

GW have become the biggest problem in Wargaming, their game systems are terrible and their approach to making profits is "Jack up prices to make up for less customers". They keep releasing new editions which dumb the rules down and then they release army rulebooks where there is no balance (in Fantasy there are 3 tier 1 armies, you play 1 or you lose to them, in a game of 15 factions or so), but little kids buy into GW as the gateway drug. They are only just starting to release nice models, but you need so many of them it becomes insanely expensive to build any sort of real army.

If you're a wargamer and wish to play a good game and support a good company then get into Warmachine/Hordes. It's a more mature game with better quality miniatures, with balanced rules and a company that supports it's fans. Privateer press are updating to a MKII version for January, in doing so they have released the rules for every model and the main rulebook for MKII for free on PDF. They also consider fan feedback in balancing things, they are currently running a fieldtest for the beta rules for Hordes MKII, fans get to play the game and they can give feedback on how to buff/nerf a model if they wish. PP take this into consideration and did fix issues with Warmachine MKII models.

Privateer also support their game systems. They started out making D20 books but moved onto Wargaming (and now boardgames) and intend to return to the roleplaying side of things where possible, but in their bi-monthly Magazine you will always find 5 pages dedicated to a new scenario for the roleplaying, as well as about 10 pages of solid fluff for the Iron Kingdoms, some examples are alchemist guilds famous through out the land to how humans discovered magic and the secret society that grew up from that. To supplement this, their roleplaying books are now out of print, so they have put them up as PDFs for people to download from several E book sites.

Privateer press are not perfect and maybe in the future they will become the new GW, but as a wargamer I am happy to support a company that tries to support the community around it. One example that sticks out in my mind is there was a new faction released recently, on the forums people were discussing what their robots were made out of, no one was quite sure and one guy requested some official word. 20 minutes later the lead writer had posted with at least an A4 page's worth of text explaining every possible detail you could wish on the subject. PP isn't a small company and yet it's staff members still do things like this and get "into the trenches" with the fans.

Disclaimer : I play PP games, I don't work for them in any way. I dislike GW because I see what a mess they make and yet they keep selling people their personal brand of crack, which restricts the wargaming industry and does more harm than good in general.

Comment Re:Crew Fix. (Score 1) 219

Yes, the "Russian crew members" should be forced to all be plumbers to resolve problems like this. That'll sure be useful if the US and Russia ever have any political differences. Maybe every American sent into Space should be trained on all skills they could possibly need up there, so they can deal with any situation at hand instead. I mean it's not rocket science to make sure your crew is prepared for things like this, where as it's pretty damn stupid to depend on someone else doing it (although this an increasingly common attitude these days)

Comment Ghost busters (Score 1) 205

I've been a huge fan pretty much since birth and all this makes me think is that I won't be buying the game. I picked the 360 because it had more games and content I wanted to play, I was quite looking forward to the game but a year+ delay just means by the time it has a 360 release I will be buying something else and the game will be long forgotten. It's a shame that Sony are trying to sell their console instead of selling a game, their first priority should be to making profit and making successful games, not to screw a game's sales over by desperately clawing at a failing console.

The PS3 is in a bad position and is clearly in last place this generation, but they do themselves no favours by stealing a game from the 360, because they will lose far more in game sales (and reviving a franchise) than they will gain from getting a handful of new consoles sold. I don't really care for the fanboy crap and was tempted to buy a PSP for some games recently, but when I see Sony's commitment is to selling hardware and not selling great games, I question if I should be giving them money.

Comment Re:Rat Race (Score 2) 391

As someone who is sitting here recovering from an operation I must strongly disagree with you. I met some damn incompetent people at the hospital and wouldn't of minded smacking them up side the head, but I also met some very good nurses and last time I checked my operation went well and that says my surgeon probably did his job pretty damn well.

We remember the incompetent far more than the competent, if people are doing their jobs well you will rarely hear about them but the moment they make 1 mistake there will be giant flashing billboards 3 inches from your nose. Not everyone is terrible at what they do, it's just if they do what they are meant to you will never have them stand out to you.

Censorship

Submission + - EU Commissioner Calls For Censorship Of Web Search (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader writes: According to the Reuters, "Internet searches for bomb-making instructions should be blocked across the European Union, the bloc's top security official said on Monday". Franco Frattini, the EU Justice and Security commissioner, "intend[s] to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector ... on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism ..." So, how long before the tech companies in USA are being investigated for assisting the evil EU to curb free speech of their citizens? And what chances there are for the Europeans among us to kick Mr. Frattini out of his office before it's too late to even talk about it in the Internets?
Censorship

Submission + - Law students sue anonymous message board posters (wsj.com)

The Xoxo Reader writes: "The Wall Street Journal reports that two female students at Yale Law School have filed suit for defamation and infliction of emotional distress against an administrator and several anonymous posters (identified only by their pseudoynms) at the popular law student discussion board AutoAdmit (a.k.a. Xoxohth). One of the claims is that the posters have violated copyright laws by reposting pictures of the women without their permission. Since AutoAdmit's administrators have previously said that they do not retain IP logs of posters, it is unclear how the plaintiffs will ultimately be able to identify the actual people behind the pseudonyms named in the complaint. Apparently, one method was to post the summons on the message board itself and ask the posters to step forward. The controversy leading to this lawsuit was previously discussed on Slashdot here."
Software

Submission + - Bush names anti-open source lobbyist as counselor (pressesc.com)

Citizen Pain writes: "President Bush today appointed as his counselor a man who received $820,000 from Microsoft to lobby during negotiations over its antitrust settlement as well as to oppose the use, especially within the government, of "open source" systems such as Linux. Enron also paid him $700,000 in 2001 alone to lobby on the "California energy crisis" and thwart efforts to re-regulate the Western electricity market through price controls."
Intel

Submission + - Intel in graphics partnership with Nvidia?

An anonymous reader writes: Intel may get some help building its upcoming floating point accelerator Larrabee. Following some rumors earlier this month, which claimed that Intel and Nvidia will be trading technologies, TG Daily now says that it has received information that the two companies will be announcing a "graphics partnership". An acquisition of Nvidia is a bit unlikely right now, but if Intel has access to Nvidia GPU technology, what exactly does that mean for AMD/ATI? Looks like Intel is catching up with AMD's ideas much faster than we thought.

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