Posts by Greg J Preece
1998 posts • joined Wednesday 10th June 2009 08:25 GMT
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Posted in Windows Vista woes killed MS Pinball
Windows has built-in games?
And people play them? Seriously?
Given the option of Solitaire or something from my Steam collection....Steam wins.
Speaking of rampant Day Z hackery, check out Team AVO's Day Z vids. They're hilarious.
Re: Dead on arrival...
They denied something? Where? It's a bit harsh to go laying all the blame at Valve's feet when they didn't develop the game. Would you blame Game if you'd bought War Z off the shelf and it was shit? I'm thinking back to Sword of the Stars 2 as an example, which was released completely broken; no-one blamed the retailers, FFS.
Posted in The best smartphones for Christmas
Re: Those were the times
Upvote for the N900. Still got mine, still use it for work stuff over the S3. The S3 is a consumer device, in that you can view things on it, and browse things on it, but the minute I want to actually do something the N900 comes out. A task as simple as searching an e-mailed logfile became a tortuous task on the S3, but takes about 5 seconds on the N900.
Posted in The best smartphones for Christmas
Can't you just rotate it the other way so the soft buttons are at the opposite side to your hand?
You're not seriously trying to say I'm "holding it wrong", are you? ;-)
If I'm holding it one-handed at the bottom, it makes sense to rotate it from there.
I'm not sure why someone down-voted you, you were merely expressing your personal preference, whilst accepting that not everyone feels that same.
People do love that button. Two downvotes so far for "I think soft touch is shit and here is why."
Re: Get it right next time
Hysterical much? Satirical mucher.
Twice in two days; if you're going to do satire, don't do crap satire.
Re: Get it right next time
Putting aside the possibility that fracking will cause massive earth tremors that will destroy all our homes, infrastructure and civilisation
Hysterical much?
Re: My plumber has an iPhone
iPhone starts at £529 SIM free not £650.
I highlighted something for you. Also, he was talking historically, and so was I, though on reflection I got the currency wrong. It was €650.
Posted in The best smartphones for Christmas
Personally, I don’t care for Samsung’s insistence on using a physical home key on its phones but I’m obviously in a minority on that score
Personally I wish they'd take soft-touch buttons and throw them down a well, never to be heard of again. I utterly despise them. Almost every time I rotate my S3 one-handed - to watch a video, for example - one tenth of a micron of skin hits the back button and boom! There goes my content. It's absolutely infuriating, and really speaks to the obsession with crap touch controls at the expense of buttons, which work.
Re: My plumber has an iPhone
the iPhone brought the smartphone to the masses
By costing £650?
Apple doesn't do "unwashed masses", mate.
More western technologies to corrupt their ways of living....
Those western bastards, giving them the ability to fucking see. You're right, we should stop all these evil culture incursions, such as medicine and food. All we're doing is corrupting them!
Incidentally, you're a ringpiece.
What's wrong with you? You must pull out a device for a poxy 10 hours!
I enjoy keeping my brain stimulated? I'll admit, that's a clear difference between us.
Re: @AC
A book too heavy for your puny little boy arms? Stop trying to justify your childish little strop.
Strop? He's moaning about electronics, then watching the in-flight movie, and I'm wondering how. I might also be taking the piss somewhat.
Unless you have an answer for how he can sit on a modern, electronically controlled airliner, watching a digitally recorded film via an electronic device, and have the testicular elephantitis required to call anything he doesn't use a "toy" for them filthy young 'uns...
Or do electronic things scare you, old man?
Re: Linux is much more stable for gaming than windows
Yeah, sure. For Tuxracer maybe. The rest has to be forced to work with a half-assed Windows emulator.
Pathetic.
Pathetic, eh? OK, what frameworks does Windows have for running Mac games?
Never mind that the major game engines are pretty much all Linux compatible from the get-go.
Tit.
Re: final blow for Windows
Your games portfolio must be pretty small. :E
You're only thinking in terms of old software. If they marketed it as a console and got people to develop for it, they'd develop for it as a new platform. I'm pretty certain that the PS3 isn't Windows underneath.
There are thousands of old games that will never get a Mac or Linux port, but if they can encourage major developers to cross-platform the coming games, then in time Windows will become redundant.
Gotta get AMD to fix their drivers first, though. They're horrendous.
Re: Just hurry up with the Linux port
Not too fussed about playing on my telly tbh but they need to get working on the Linux port now.
You know that's in beta, right? I'm in it. The client looks identical to the Windows one, the overlay is a million times faster, and it's currently about as stable as Mel Gibson.
*Cough* Called it.
Bloody knew it. Ten quid says Half Life 3 is the release title. Been saying this for aaaaages.
Re: Crash and Burn
I for one always ask anyone I see using a phone in an airplane to turn it off after that experience.
Yes, because '95 phones and Pentiums are IDENTICAL to an Airbus A330.. And I think your understanding of CPU clock speeds may be somewhat flawed...
And there are plenty of examples of airplanes dropping from the sky without explanation to make someone edgy.
No there aren't. It might take longer in some cases than others to figure out why a plane crashed, but most accidents are resolved to a startling degree of accuracy. You might stop paying attention when the crash leaves the newspapers, but the NTSB, etc don't. Most people still think Air France 447 was never resolved, for example. Nonsense.
Turn it off please,.. or I'll have to kill you.. Huh? Yes,.. quite mad.. and dangerous at the slightest provocation... Thank you miss...have a nice flight.
You sound more dangerous than the devices. Dick.
@AC
You sound like such a moaning old fart I'm tempted to call troll.
They wouldn't think of watching a movie or reading or doing something educational. They desire to be entertained 24/7. That explains electronic toys, Farcebook and social media.
I'd love to know how you're going to watch a movie without an electronic "toy". And I read a lot, from an electronic reader. If my solutions to being bored on a flight are inferior to yours because they're newer, then I suggest you go the whole hog and take an aeroprop to your destination. I'll be waiting for you in the bar at the other end, watching YouTube vids to pass the time.
Christ, there's some miserable old farts on here, especially considering it's a tech site. If there's some class of consumer device that brings down planes, it hasn't managed it yet, and if it exists, then leave that class of device banned. Other than that, why assume that "electronic device" refers to "something that will annoy your whingeing arse"?
Everything is electronic these days. I've been harassed before for an eBook reader. It barely uses any power to begin with, but no, can't read for large sections of the flight. That would be dangerous...somehow....somewhere....in some alternate dimension...
If I want to fire up my PSP on a flight, how is that any different to you watching the in-flight movie? And if my PSP or reader is going to bring down the plane, why wouldn't your wristwatch or the headset monitor? I wouldn't be surprised if my own body put out a larger EM field than some of the electronic kit I use.
The fear over EM fields here is exactly the same as the fear over wireless routers in schools; a load of crap perpetuated by people who don't get how stuff works. As for "keep them banned, I'm grumpy", no thanks. You can stare at the back of the seat in front for 10 hours if you like. I'm going to play God of War.
Re: Why compare apples with oranges?
It's generally done to try and show that video gaming is a legitimate media. As a certain Mr Brooker will often point out, you're allowed to be a film enthusiast, or a literary snob, and people think you're all sophisticated. Discuss how you enjoy the beautiful escapism of Okami, or how immersive the latest FPS is, and people call you a manchild/nerd.
Re: Is it sustainable?
Tribes is F2P, I've not spent a penny on it and still manage to hold my own (most games)
I would agree that it's less pay-to-win than most of the F2P games out there, and I did play it for a while. Their pricing is also less insane than others - at launch it was £35 for pretty much all the content, which is much more reasonable (except that the game didn't have a whole lot of actual content - few maps, etc).
It was also the lack of complexity in the gameplay compared with the original Tribes games that put me off, if I'm honest. For example, they kept in all the weapons and armour sets that allow you to base-camp, but removed all the kit that let you defend against that. In the original I could build my own base, mod on the fly, etc, etc. Ascend is a poor imitation, as was Vengeance.
Still, the F2P bait-and-switch is there, if you ask me. I did far better in terms of scoring in the earlier games than in Ascend, and there always seems to be someone with a superior loadout ready to mess you up.
Re: Is it sustainable?
There plenty of other FPS games out there that are free to play.
You mean pay-to-win. I got sick of the F2P model ten seconds after it appeared. If you want to have any kind of useful content, or stand a chance against the paid players, you have to pay in, and the total cost is way more than just buying a game outright. To get all the content, you need to pay a frankly infeasible amount of money, and unlocking it through free play is reckoned in some cases to take several decades.
I was excited as hell for Tribes to come back, and I got into the beta. I quickly realised how the F2P model ruined it. Same goes for Planetside 2, which looks really interesting, but at $7 per weapon they can fuck off. Hawken too, looked amazing, right up until they announced it was F2P.
I really hope the F2P business model dies a horrible, painful death. It ruins everything it touches.
Re: Misleading headline
Instagram is, in itself, a method of identifying hipsters.
The single most pointless service I have ever seen in my entire life. Take photo, make photo look worse to somehow inversely make you look trendy, post to Tw@tter. Appending "inspirational" quotes to show how different and deep you are is optional.
Re: Phantom voters are phantom users
In fairness, the dude is just taking cues from the governments around him. How many petitions on the official UK or US government websites have actually been acted on?
Here's a notion
Rather than punishing companies for moving their profits out of the country to where taxation rates are less insane, how about making the taxation rates here less insane and encouraging international business in the UK?
Just a thought...
"On what grounds??"
"It's written on your trunks."
"That says Speedo. My hand was covering the 's'!"
"There's no smoke without fire!"
Re: Sex offenders should be public knowledge
OK, pop quiz. How does this:
They most definitely should post the names and location of sex offenders to protect society who's interest comes before convicted paedophile's "rights".
Work with this:
Vigilanty activities should not be tolerated under any circumstances.
Without even reacting to my pet peeve of seeing "rights" in quotation marks, how does publishing names and addresses of convicted criminals assist anything other than vigilantism and persecution? The aim of the justice system is to rehabilitate as well as punish. I'd love to know how that's going to happen when they've got a big marker over their head. You might as well give them armbands to wear.
Re: Blight?@ Greg J Preece
Where did the OP state that?
You're right, they merely heavily implied it, on a thread directly discussing it. How could I have ever made the connection? And if your justification for mounting the high horse is : "you swore, so you're wrong, but I'm condescending, so I'm right", then I have bad news: the OP also cursed. I think you need to go back and call them pathetic.
Also, I love the inanity of naming several famous serial killers (who received no leniency), and then talking about how the justice system is too lenient.
The OP was implying that persecution of those convicted should continue after their punishment, which was my actual argument if you'd bothered to read my post before turning your nose up at my language. And that kind of thinking makes me angry enough to use phrases like "fuck off into the sun." Geddit?
Re: Tabloid Brains
Oh FFS, are we descending to the level of Have Your Say when people start posting shit poetry?
Re: Blight?
As a matter of fact, let's just realize that some crimes should never be forgiven by society. This is one of them.
And that makes vigilante mobs OK? Fuck off. Just, fuck off. Out of the country, off the planet, and preferably into the sun.
We have a justice system because (we pretend) we're not a bunch of savages. They make un-emotive decisions, appropriate punishments, and abstract the entire thing away from the kind of cretins who would approve of mob justice. Once someone has gone through that justice system, it has not got a fucking thing to do with you.
Does anyone remember when the focus of our justice system was rehabilitation and reintegration, rather than the whims of shitheads like this?
What's Nightingale then? :-p
God, it's ugly. I can't be the only one thinking that, can I? I've spent years wondering how Apple's default selection of greys gets called "beautiful", but when MS do it, it's ugly. For simply playing music, Songbird looks and works better than this, and that's a FOSS Mozzy app!
Bungie have cited Niven...as inspiration for...Halo
No kidding? I was wondering if they'd ever 'fess up to that whole "Ringworld" thing.
Re: But but but....
BF had vehicles first.
I think you misspelt Starsiege: Tribes... Or perhaps Terminator: Future Shock. Either way, Battlefield was nowhere near the first.
Uh-huh. A "genre-defining" shooter from Bungie, eh? That's bloody terrifying. The last one was over-hyped, over-marketed mediocrity that set shooters back nearly a decade. We're still suffering from it. I look forward to watching the hype machine spin up well in advance.
Oi, Bungie, how about a sequel to Oni?
Re: In the same way Linux runs faster than windows on the same h/w
Yeah, sure. You obviously haven't tried a modern Linux distribution like Ubuntu, other wise you'd have known that such general statements are plain BS.
Actually, I'm thinking the same of you. Every machine I have dual or triple boots, and Linux is always the fastest system by light years. I though Win7 was snappy on my desktop, then I installed Kubuntu, and it's crazy fast.
Patent? Come on now, surely that's a trademark at best?
Re: If anything
Just because the PC is 'higher spec' doesn't mean that the game would look better on it than on a console.
Yes and no. You can get more out of dedicated hardware in a console than you could with the same hardware in a PC, yes. The problem is that a modern PC's hardware capabilities often greatly outstrip what is necessary to run the basic OS (and Windows has gotten faster in recent years). If you look at the processor in a 360, it's seriously old hat at this point. Every PC I ever lay hands on is way more powerful. You can stretch that chip as far as you like, but it has a limit.
The other problem is that games are developed to be cross-platform. Games that have to be released on PS3, 360 and PC are hampered because the 360 can't do anything above DirectX 9. (Windows fecking XP!) Dedicated PC games, on the other hand, can ditch the out-of-date graphics libraries, cross-platform abstractions, etc and just go all-out.
Trufax: inFamous 2 was supposed to be a cross-platform release, but Sucker Punch tried it and said "sorry guys, the X-box just can't do this well enough."
Re: I disagree
Big money in them thar handhelds.
And as I said, nowhere near as much money as BLOPS2 made in one hour. Besides, did you see the number of projects Rovio released before they made it big? And how many others have made it as far?
Re: I disagree
Those who consider themselves serious gamers are now in the minority. The mobile and Wii and Facebook and BigFish and Flash gaming crowd - we'll call them "casual" for simplicity - are a much, much larger market than the codbloppers. Even larger than the Haloites.
Perhaps in terms of numbers, but in terms of money? I can't see Angry Birds doing a $1bn midnight release any time soon.
Re: If anything
Try that with a PC and most (note, not ALL) modern games and you'll be lucky if it's even going to work in noddy graphics mode 3 years down the line.
Sorry, got to disagree with you there. There's this odd myth that old PC games don't work on modern systems. That's true with some games (Deus Ex 2 being a prime example), but they're definitely the exceptions to the rule. You can connect to Steam today, download Half Life 1, and it'll work, despite being 14 years old. I've been playing Wing Commander 1 from 1990 on my quad-core Win7 box, no worries.
Re: If anything
Sure, you can connect a PC up to these bits of kit, but them you have to factor in keeping a PC in the living room.
With things like the Windows 8 interface and the new Steam interface tailored for large screens, won't this be exactly the same as keeping a console in your living room, except it can do a shitload more with less hassle? I've been a PC and console gamer for 20 years, and it's only recently that I've finally considered hooking the PC to the TV.
Re: Okami
You died? In Okami?? I can't remember dying outside of a devil gate cave, ever. Did you not have an Astral Pouch or something?
In fairness, I did hear that the Wii controls sucked. I played PS myself.
Re: Whatever any PS3 owner does this year...
Another vote for Okami HD. The PS2 version was great and the HD remaster only improves thinga. One of the finest, most original and imaginitive games I've ever played. Blows the Zelda games away.
In answer to the box speculation, I believe it came out boxed in Japan.
Re: My prediction
Haven't Apple just finalised the designs for their new building? Bet they've patented walls.
But not Windows, boom boom!
Buddhist?
Every time I look at a top-down view of that thing, all I hear is a posh English voice saying "you may fire when ready."
@Doc
That's how it used to be before Jetpack plugins came along. If you're using old pre-Jetpack plugins, you will still have that problem.
Re: Hopefully he will do something about their tech "journelism"
Their tech journalism is pretty pathetic. The number of inconsistencies, mistakes, and misunderstandings is pretty bad. It's Gadget Show level.
