Posts by Thomas 4

Re: Post I made on the Steam forums about this:

I dunno, I'd have to disagree that all Kickstarter games are like that. Grim Dawn springs to mind - the team developing it (the same guys that made Titan Quest) have managed to make the basic outline of the game including some very solid looking demos of actual gameplay footage and have turned to Kickstarter to get it finished off.

Not disagreeing with your take on the Carmageddon project - if they really did spend 333k just getting the naming rights before doing a spot of code - but don't be too quick to discourage others from looking into Kickstarter games.

Seems a little implausible

£22,000 worth of Macbooks. Now, being educationally minded, these probably aren't Macbook Pros but one of the older, pre-Air sorts. Now, assuming the school cough about £1k per laptop, factoring in bulk buying and less taxes, etc, it's 22 Macbooks.

In an adult, it can contain about 300ml, according to wikipedia or in another word's a Coke can's worth. In a child it's probably about the size of a Capri Sun.

I'm just trying to work out he would have arranged the Macbooks in order to ensure they all get soaked to bust the warranties. If he put them all in a huge stack, i.e. 22 ontop of each other, would he have been able to fire up to reach the ones on the top?

But then if he laid them out on the floor in a 4x5 grid arrangement, would there be enough surface area to cover them all....?

Re: The cure to nostalgia!

That, sunshine, depends an awful lot on the game in question.

Although graphically something like Elite is crap compared to a HD game like Skyrim, the gameplay mechanics of it are still as rock solid now as they were back then. Don't believe me? Fire up a good two player game like Ikari Warriors or Vindicators and plow through waves of baddies to the accompaniment of explosions everywhere. Or perhaps with your new found gaming leetness, you can finally finish off that game of Dizzy that you almost-finished-but-never-quite-made-it.

Sure, not everything that came out on an Amstrad or Spectrum was gaming gold and some of them were truly awful but to dismiss everything as being unworthy of a second playthrough many years later reeks of snobbery.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to that game of Syndicate I'm playing on GOG.

Re: Oh yeah...

Yay for other Amstrad users! ^_^

CPC6128 user myself, with a COLOUR screen. Those were the days, when a game was £9.99 for a new release (or if you wanted to save yourself a multiloading headache, £14.99 for the disk version). The budget ranges like Hit Squad and the ever cheap and cheerful Codemasters releases with Fantasy World Dizzy, Magicland Dizzy and Dizzy in the Shamelessly Shoehorned Into What Would Otherwise Be A Crappy Puzzle Game Adventure.

The joys of Read Error B and its more evil cousin Read Error A. These no good punk kids don't appreciate what makes a good game these days....

Re: I haven't heard any comment from any teachers

This is going to sound appallingly arrogant but fuck it...

The thing that educated me most about computers wasn't the clapped out BBC Micro I had in middle school, because it was just one program we used on there to teach us how to form sentences, a task that could have been more easily done with a blackboard and a book.

It wasn't in secondary school either, where we used Acorns for 5 years and only had a brief glance at Windows 95 in our final year and what "IT" information was in the course was confused and pointless.

No, my real education started at the age of 5 or 6 with my Amstrad CPC and learning to type out lines of code in BASIC. Fiddling with bits of information here and there to see what would happen (hint: it usually ended in the phrase "syntax error").

The next phase of my education came with my dad's 286DX PC and a floppy disk that offered to teach me the mysteries of MS-DOS. It started as boring distraction but the more I messed around with file systems the moer I began to enjoy myself and the knowledge I was gaining.

Phase 3 still haunts my nightmares even now and it's all thanks to Desert Strike. A highly frustrating game in itself but even getting to the final mission of the final campaign and dying to a lack of fuel was nothing compared to getting to actually run. Yes, from this monumental pain in the arse I learned how to edit config.sys and autoexec.bat files - the arcane mysteries of EMM386.exe, LOADHIGH and HIMEM, all trying to squeeze the right mix of memory in order to run it.

Then came Windows 95 and my inevitable surrender to a non-command line OS. Again, most of what I learned came from trying to run games - things such as drivers, installing new hardware and basic PC housekeeping. My dad had finally relented at this point at got me my own PC at last. The blistering speed with which it ran when it had a whopping 16Mb RAM.

I guess the point of this horribly self indulgent wall of text is that most of the stuff I learned about computers didn't come from school tuition, which in my teenage arrogance I saw as being vastly below me, but instead came from crashes, debugging and a burning desire to play games.

I still have fond memories of almost failing my computing A-level. I got bored with the database they'd asked us to work on and instead spent my time building a quite passable game of pontoon with an AI that knew when to bet and when to hold.

@BB

Yup - you've nailed it there.

Cruise put in a fairly decent performance, the special effects were good and the terraforming sequence was creepy as hell....

...but that kid, that ENDLESSLY SCREAMING KID. Jesus.

Re: YAHWHO?

Much to my shame, I admit using Yahoo for a quick view of the days headlines and it's absolutely repulsive. The articles lack spell checking, have never seen an editor of any sort and the comments section seems to have been taken over by Neo-Nazis all hellbent on out-trolling each other.

I need a new news website. -.-

Re: Interference - @Mage

I'm afraid I'm with the others on this - you need to link documents and research to back up your claims otherwise you'll have a hard time convincing people.

Re: Ahhhhh!

Ahh, true love.

'Twould be so much simpler if everyone had access to flamethrowers.

This was the first thought in my mind as well...

Maybe we could turn into a drinking game. Every time you see something that's potentially patentable, you take a swig of your favourite tipple.

" Apple's proposal, we're told, has the nano-SIM the same length as a micro-SIM is wide, encouraging the user to jam the wrong SIM into the slot."

Patent Pending: Case marking showing where to insert SIM card. *drinks*

"The addition of a loading tray, as proposed by Apple..."

Patent Pending: Grav sled SIM card insterion method. *drinks*

I forsee myself getting quite drunk after reading a Samsung or Apple article.

@TRT

Die in a fire please. Slowly.

I'd forgotten that wretched video until you brought it up. >:(

A glimpse of the future

Out of the radioactive holocaust, as civilisation freezes under a nuclear winter, vault dwellers will ponder the meaning of the words that led to mankind's demise.

"Bloody Siri."

You know something?

I actually hope the Flying Spaghetti Monster is real. I want to see it flying towards Earth as scientists and priests sit there weeping into their textbooks and prayer books. As the colossal meatballs roll across continents and oceans turn into tomato sauce, I will laugh hysterically, comforted by the fact that everything the human race knew and believed was utterly ridiculous and pointless.

Re: In my puritanical youth

Good man. We'll get you playing Doom yet and maybe, if you keep working at it, we'll even treat you to a foul and perverse Mass Effect sex scene!