If this is being offered on Live & PSN then it's a dead cert than it's not going to be 'hardcore'.

I agree with you, but then realistically, a perfectly modelled kart will be hugely fun to drive anyway - that's kind of the point of them... they're incredibly nimble and grippy, and handle in an "arcadey" way in real life...

Is this the patch that magically de-ages me by 10 years so I'm still fast enough to play UT?

Now THAT is something I want to see. My reactions suck now. Perhaps we can get some old-person servers set up with slo-mo mutators or something?

Just not sure how this could even happen though.

Simple.

1) Patcher is told to replace .\boot.ini
2) Someone makes a mistake and loses the first .
3) Patcher is now told to replace \boot.ini
4) Profit? No, wait. System death.

I bought X3 on Steam ages ago - several months, at least.

SMA, thanks for that bit of lucid analysis. I'm interested in ET: QW, but I'm still concerned that it's going to have an enormous learning curve.

Even "simple" games like Halo 2 are incredibly frustrating when you play for 35 mins and die 50+ times (yeah, I suck with a console controller)...

It sounds like this might be more tactical than a complete twitch-fest, so I can see it being reasonably okay to get into, provided I'm "smart" about how I play. Given that the last online FPS I played was HL2DM, I think it might be time to brush up my skills a bit

Best of luck with the storm, Blue - hope there's no damage to property (or more importantly people/dogs)!

Agreed totally.

I'd certainly be nervous of this. I'm -9.75 dioptres in each eye, so I'm nervous of screwing things up

That said, I've just bought a new pair of specs - they cost me £497, ($994 at today's exchange rate). Ouch.

The clue is actually in the name of the WMV file, if you know about the product - take a look at http://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/ for the system.

I have no idea if it's any good, but quite a few hardcore driving sims have support for it, so I'd assume it's at least usable.

Yeah, that probably should have been CAT6, no offense.

For the gigabit ethernet that the 360 doesn't have? Or the gigabit ethernet card not installed in my desktop?

I'm sure I'll rue the day when my decision to finish my CAT5e wiring comes back to bite me in the ass. I'll send you an e-mail.

Having just finished a project that included wiring a 20,000 square foot office, I can safely tell you that Cat6 is absolutely only useful in runs of more than 40 metres. Cat5e works absolutely fine at full gigabit speeds over shorter runs. Cat6 has irritating bend radius requirements as well, as the copper is thicker, and that makes it harder to install.

I don't know if this is a huge amount of help, but I dual-booted XP and the Vista betas with no problems at all, and my gf's iMac has OSX and Vista RC2 dual-booting currently. As soon as I get round to renewing my MSDN subscription, I'll put Vista on my new machine, basically so I can test my 8800GTS in DirectX 10

i have been using an 8800 on windows xp for two months without major problems.

Same here ....

Thirded - although I'd go as far as to say, without any problems at all.

In the interests of fairness, my old machine with an ATI Radeon X800 Pro has had no driver problems in memory either.

Nvidia's drivers for Vista (on my GF's iMac with a 7600GT onboard) were rather sucky around the Release Candidate 2 phase (which is fair enough), no idea what they're like now though.

HL2: Episode One at 10 GBP too would be a pretty good price.

I think I paid a total of £11.24 for Ep1 on preorder from Steam... $17.95+VAT at the exchange rate back then wasn't bad at all

Dante,

Thanks for taking this in the spirit it's intended

I think you've missed the point very slightly - on new hardware (i.e. Core Duo/Athlon X2 and up), Vista is slightly faster than XP in day-to-day use, in my personal experience. On my P4-class machine, it is admittedly slightly slower.

I'm not planning to roll Vista out to anyone here (I run the IT department for a company with about 120 machines) until I absolutely have to. I've only just got everyone stabilized on XP, and I'm damned if I'm doing it all over again. There are some Vista features I like the look of, notably the enormous number of extra Group Policy settings that you can control, but there's nothing hugely compelling for me right now.

I'm absolutely not saying "EVERYONE UPGRADE!" - but to blanket accuse Vista of being very slow is simply false.

Oh, and to the guy that's calling me a shill - grow up. I might use Windows heavily at work, but at home I have a G4 PowerBook and an Intel iMac, along with my standard Windows gaming machine. I don't feel particularly strongly about Vista one way or the other. In fact, I still find XP much more comfortable to use day-to-day.

That said, I have spent a good amount of time reading and dissecting articles about Vista's architecture, and I do believe that, given a bit of time for hardware manufacturers to get a handle on the final codebase, it will end up being faster for newer games. Older games with much smaller command batch numbers will probably see little-to-no difference, although Vista's slightly smarter process scheduler might allow games to run a very small amount faster by bumping all non-game tasks to another core in a multicore setup.

This comment was edited on Jan 27, 13:35.

I could approach this by attacking your spelling and grammar, or lack thereof. Instead, I'm going to disagree with you in a civil way.

I've been testing Vista since the earlyish Beta days, and while I admittedly haven't had a chance to play with the RTM version (stupid MSDN subscription lapsed and I've not had time to renew it), RC1 and RC2 were both very nearly as quick in desktop use and overall "snappiness" on my P4/1GB RAM box. On my gf's 24" iMac (Core2Duo, 2GB RAM), Vista is overall smoother and faster to use than XP, simply because it's better set up for multicore processors.

Yes, Vista is RAM-hungry at startup, but a huge amount of that gets paged out the moment the machine actually NEEDS the RAM.

I agree that the interface is, in places, rather more "dumbed down" than power users are used to, but that's been the case with every version of just about every operating system in history.

Architecturally, Vista should run better than XP on newer hardware, and the re-architected DirectX pipeline will mean that games should see a real-world performance benefit.

Games are slower in Vista at the moment, mostly because GPU drivers are still a long way from optimised, but I fully expect Vista to overtake XP by a slim but significant margin on modern hardware.

I believe that for now, it is more a matter of market share rather than technical problems that has kept many games from the mac. It might change.

Yes and no.

I'm a Mac owner (in fact, I own 2 Macs and one PC), and since the move to Intel CPUs, the Mac is at finally on a par with with a Windows box CPU-wise. That said, Macs generally don't ship with decent GPUs. The standard iMac (which, let's face it, isn't particularly cheap) ships with either an ancient Radeon X1600 Pro or a GeForce 7300GT, both of which frankly suck. Even the top-end 24" iMac only has an option for a 7600GT, which isn't awful, but it's by no means designed for high-end gaming on the integrated 1920x1200 panel. As the owner of one of these machines, it's not an awful GPU, but it's not brilliant by any stretch of the imagination.

Even the scarily powerful dual-dual-core Mac Pro (which will set you back approximately a bazillion pounds) ships by default with at 7300GT. There's an option for a Radeon 1900XT, which is a nice card, but let's face it - it's not top-end.

Hardware is only part of the story though. Aspyr (one of the key companies that port Windows games to the Mac) have found that Mac OS X's OpenGL stack is significantly slower than Windows'. This seriously hurt performance of Doom 3-engined games, and there's nothing any of the third-party developers can't do about it.

Bottom line, as far as I can see, Apple simply don't see the Mac gaming as anything even approaching a priority. It's a pity really, because Mac OS X is a superb operating system, and they make lovely hardware.

Oh, and in answer to TorTorden's point about not supporting integrated graphics: Reading between the lines, they don't support the Intel GMA900/950, which rules out support for the Mac Mini, the iBook, and the MacBook. The PowerBook, MacBook Pro, iMac, and Mac Pro should be able to run Prey.

This comment was edited on Jan 14, 11:18.

Personally, I would have been inclined to say "Human Head Head Human Heads Out", but then I'm stupid

I completely agree though, it's a superb headline... one of the things that keeps me coming to Blue's is the humour

I own a 360, have done for about 9 months now, and aside from it currently being dead (some problem with the DVD drive), I've enjoyed played a huge host of games on it.

Just about the only game I really couldn't get into was Dead Rising. I play games primarily for the enjoyment, progression, and "wow" factor, rather than a harsh, unforgiving challenge, and Dead Rising, while a great game for a "good gamer" just wasn't for me.

Redundancy planning is a bitch, to be fair.

As an example, take the phone system we have at work.

It's a software-based VOIP system using 30-channel ISDN cards to communicate with the outside world. We have it set up with 2 servers in active/passive mode, and one of the most important parts of the system handles faxing.

The redundancy chain is as follows:

1) Faxing to email through fax components on primary server
2) Faxing to email through fax components on secondary server
3) Faxing to fax machines through fax machines plugged into IP->Analog converters on primary server
4) Faxing to fax machines through fax machines plugged into IP->Analog converters on secondary server
5) Faxing to fax machines call-routed out of the building and back in again on separate analog lines through primary server
6) Faxing to fax machines call-routed out of the building and back in again on separate analog lines through secondary server
7) Faxing direct to fax machines plugged into separate analog lines.

Now, you'd think that's more than enough redundancy, where there's no way anything could affect it.

That said, yesterday the fax components on the primary server died. That kills option 1.

The secondary server suffered a hardware failure 3 days ago and as such has no connection with the outside world. Say bye-bye to 2, 4, and 6.

It turned out after some diagnostics that the ISDN board wasn't handling the fax protocol properly, so no call routing could be done, so that kills options 3 and 4.

Finally, the analog lines were accidentally disconnected by our provider as we don't use them normally and they'd detected they'd been inactive for a long time. Whoops, there goes options 5,6, and 7.

The moral of the (long and boring) tale is that no matter how well you plan for redundancy, some fucking thing always messes it up.

xxBatmanXx, Best of luck with the puppy. Not the praying type, but my thoughts are with you, man.