Far Cry was awesome, totally cool, with a wicked setting and solid game beneath the unparalleled graphics. Crysis is the sequel, the game that many people - myself included - had firmly in mind when building a new PC not long ago. Read on for my review... And please, beware of spoilers!
The Pirate Bay is one of the world's largest and most popular bittorrent trackers. You can find nearly any digital content there, be it music, movies or games or anything else. It's operated by a fun-loving bunch of misfits in Sweden, where linking and indexing illegal content is not illegal.
Now the Pirate Bay is being called a "Global Icon for the violation of copyright" (PDF link) by a consortium of international organizations with letters like IFPI, WIN, FEP, IPA, ICMP-CIEM, IMPALA and EFCA.
Last week The Pirate Bay received a very prestigious award. The award has not been granted before to our knowledge so we’re extremely pleased about it. We received the ‘Global Icon-status’ award, handed to us via the Swedish Ministry of Communication, but the originator where the award comes from is the organised global copylobby.
Modern Monkey (I forget her real name) has delivered the parkour documentary her and her media studies crew created. It features most of the Brisbane crew and is very well edited. It features an intro by me, which is unfortunately basically inaudible. I didn't even realize it was me for a while. =/
And the audio as a whole is pretty poor, possibly explained by the audio crewmember they dragged to every event but who basically didn't do anything...
A long, long time ago, when I was still in High School (or very shortly thereafter, which would make it c.1990) I bought a TurboGrafx 16 CD ROM system. This expensive behemoth was being cleared out of the shops and I picked it up brand new for a mere $150. It was a monster, the box it came in was nearly waist-height on account of the massive carrying case it came in, and the fact that all its components were packaged in separate compartments inside the box.
It was huge, and it was first-gen CD: a single-speed player that was totally underwhelming spec-wise: It had a mere 256kB RAM. Not 256 MEG, but two hundred and fifty six KAY. Despite being a single-speed drive (150kB/s transfer) it loaded really fast 'cause, let's face it, 256kB doesn't take long to fill at 150kB/s! Two seconds was the typical wait time.
The game I got with it was WonderBoy 3: Monster Lair. This game looked awesome and sounded better, thanks to the CD soundtrack. It was, in fact, a very accurate copy of the arcade game. Released in 1988 by Sega & Westone (the relatively unknown Westone had a long relationship with Sega, and they developed the WonderBoy franchise), it was a platform/shooter with a cute theme and vivid colours.
I never did finish the TG-16 CD version, it had a fixed number of credits you could continue with, and I'd always die around the sixth stage, in the castle. It's not an easy game, but the graphics and colours are very appealing, and last night I fired up MAME and gave the arcade version a shot.
It's a really simple and fun run/jump/shoot game. The second half of every level is a flying boss fight, where the bosses throw miniature versions of themselves at you. In the first stage (shown below) a giant fish turns its own scales into mini-fish which swim towards you. In later levels a bat opens its wings to reveal mini-bats, a skull hurls little skull ghosts, etc.
It's great fun. It's also 2-player, so you can have a go with a friend.
Running any Beta application is basically asking for trouble. Chances are the stuff you never realized you needed will completely stop working, and it's very possible your complaints or bug reports will fall on deaf ears 'cause - let's face it - it's just a beta.
I finally gave up on the newest Opera 9.5 beta, in spite of the cool features like bookmark sync. I had four reasons for doing this:
1. Many javascript popups ceased working. I could no longer view my website logs. How annoying! 2. Some sites flat-out broke. I could no longer use Flickr or my bank's website. 3. Typing an address into the address bar would often result in a 30-second wait while Opera thought long and hard about nothing in particular. 4. Too many awful changes to the keyboard shortcuts. I want my Z/X and Q/A keys back!
I really liked that animated GIFs in the beta actually ran at the right speed. In 9.24 they're too slow, and my careful frame timing is thrown out the window.
Before the internet computers were all disconnected. Even if you had a network, it was limited to the building you were in. Files were traded on floppies, and a 200MB harddrive was two hundred bucks.
We did have modems though, and with these you could - using a regular phoneline - call other computers. One at a time though, you couldn't do group calls. Back in these days I ran a Bulletin Board System (BBS) called the Wombat's Den. It was unusual among the 20 or so BBS' where I lived, in that it was not devoted to file trading or piracy. Instead it was focused on messaging, with a bulletin board - the precursor to today's forums - and little else.
I ran the place and condoned conversations of an intelligent nature. I had a 'white supremacist' forum where a friend of mine, who was a deranged racist target pistol shooter, could rant and rave and the rest of the forum's more rational users could argue against him. It was a fascinating social experiment.
It also had a sex forum, the Wombat's Bedroom. Herein were discussed all manner of things. It was an open environment long before the internet gave every freak of every kind a soapbox to stand on. It was a lot of fun, and for a while it was the busiest BBS in the region.
Several HDD and modem failures in a row brought the den down, much to my dismay.
In case you were wondering why 'wombat'... Before the internet and the 9,000,000 million other chumps using the same name, I used the handle 'wombat'. It's my favourite Australian animal and, apparently, an obscure aussie colloquialism for "ladies' man". One summer we had some friends over - cousins I think - from Australia. and I just happened to have a fantastic run of luck with the women. I was out late with a different girl four nights of the first week they were staying with us, and they started calling me a wombat.
Now, two decades later, here we are again: I've created a new forum that will, I hope, be as interesting as the Wombat's Den used to be.
I don't know that anyone will notice, or miss me, but since the new forum's soaking up most of my time now I won't be posting here quite as often.
EA's Gerhard Florin has said he wants to see one single gaming platform rather than a handful of incompatible consoles.
This sounds shockingly like an idea from Trip Hawkins, CEO of EA in the early 1990's. He went on to create the 3DO, a machine manufactured by several companies (Panasonic, Sanyo and Goldstar). The concept was similar: one platform for easy development, no more developing for radically different platforms like they do now.
The 3DO failed for several reasons, but a big problem was the hardware manufacturer's inability to profit from the sale of software. Normally console manufacturers charge a license fee before games can be released on their hardware: Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, they all do it. It's the razor-blade philosphy: sell the machine cheap, make money on the blades (games).
When the hardware is suddenly an open platform there is no more money for the manufacturer, so they won't sell it at a loss to move units (as is the current standard) and they won't drop the price as fast year on year.
So what's changed? Why is EA essentially calling for a repeat of recent history?
Bottom line is the world's largest game publisher is whinging that making tons of money is too hard. It's hard to feel sympathy.
It seems obvious that religion retards science. The catholic church insisted for a long time that the earth was the centre of the universe, that advances in birth control were evil. You cannot be an open-minded scientist at the same time you're trying to prove your church's doctrines.
I found a link to a fascinating article on slashdot, lamenting the collapse of Islamic scientific advances, and linking their fall from grace to the hardline religious stance their leaders assumed.
It was not always this way. Islam's magnificent Golden Age in the 9th–13th centuries brought about major advances in mathematics, science, and medicine. The Arabic language held sway in an age that created algebra, elucidated principles of optics, established the body's circulation of blood, named stars, and created universities. But with the end of that period, science in the Islamic world essentially collapsed. No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now.
WIDGETIZE