Hindsight is always 20/20. Most political activists don't understand this concept.

I think Far Cry is an incredibly fun, great game that really wowed me and beat a lot of the "big" developers to market.

Now, would I call it a great game? Absolutely not;

Good luck, Kenn. You've been a staple of the gaming community for a long, long time.

I just reported them all to Ebay as selling of beta software is prohibited.

Except that none of them are selling the beta software...

http://search.ebay.com/world-of-warcraft-beta

Some of these beta accounts are selling for rediculous amounts of money on e-bay.

edit: cut the URL so it's not super long. it still seems to work if you click the link, though.
This comment was edited on Jun 28, 18:34.

here were definately parts where it felt like Moore was only telling the part of the story he wants me to hear.

That's the impression I got, too. The problem with Moore bombarding the audience with every tiny detail that makes something look bad is that when he omits even the slightest detail, I must assume that the omission is because it would make his case significantly less compelling. Maybe I'm just too cynical.

Unless you used to pay $9.95/month for dial-up..

You're not including the cost of the dedicated phone line.

I think you get to go to other continents, but I am having trouble clearing level one.

Each continent is a separate game. The first 3 yetisports games are in Antartica (as you can see on the map), and then the 4th is Australia and the 5th is Africa.

http://www.yetisports.org/

and gearbox too, but have you lost it brother?! er, was this comment taken out of context? - lol. i was expecting "more dynamic than anything you've seen in gaming so far" or even "as real and potentially more dynamic than the characters in a novel."

Maybe he just doesn't know very interesting people.

Finally. Talk about a show-stopper bug for the hard-core crowd.

Thanks, Smoove! I got my account set up.. sucks that the user names must be 6 through 30 characters though -- no indiv for me.

Thanks again

Anyone else interested? Google keeps throwing invites at me like there's no tomorrow. I've got 5 invites remaining at the moment, and I swear it seems like they give me a few more each day (they've given me 8 total so far).

Sure, if you could hook me up, that'd be really cool.

happypants17@hotmail.com

Thanks

if the earth was just a barren wasteland, where did they get tools to build with? knowledge to create a whole new society? it seems it would take hundreds upon hundreds of years for enough people to get together with enough knowledge to start building zion.

Using the power of the matrix interfaces, they could have first discovered how to create and run those skill programs that let you learn anything within seconds. That'd cover any technical knowledge they'd need. I tend to think that there were machines that helped the first people once they got free, since from the canon it appears that not all machines work in harmony.

Penny Arcade (http://www.penny-arcade.com) has a review of Thief: Deadly Shadows up today. Also they point to a fan-made program that fixes the difficulty-setting bug that pretty much ruins the game for those wanting a challenge. That means I can finally start playing it again.

http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/project.thiefbot/

What it does is updates the memory locations of the game's difficulty settings periodically, just like a typical trainer would do. Pretty cool.

I think Ray's being too critical of the game. I haven't finished it yet, but I'm finding it a fine addition to the Thief franchise.

Framerate is lower, engine is even chunkier (that's saying a lot when looking at the Dark Engine,)

I can't say anything about this, since I have yet to come across a game that doesn't get fine performance on my system. Probably it's pretty taxing on mid-to-lower-end systems. The worst issue I have is some sort of video glitch that causes walls to light up even when they should be in shadow. If I move the view to certain angles, they'll flicker from light to dark. Annoying. But as far as the graphics go overall, they are beautiful and they really capture the Thief atmosphere.

Garrett can no longer swim, rope arrows are non-existent, the climbing gloves do not consistently work,

So what, so what, and that sucks. Swimming isn't necessary to propel the Thief story, and neither are rope arrows. I don't really miss either, but yes, Thief 2 had some cool swimming parts. As for the climbing gloves, I haven't been bothered by them yet but I also haven't gotten through the game, so it sucks that they're inconsistent.

the stupid loot twinkles now,

Good! They should have made this feature one that you can toggle, but I love the twinkling loot. No more stupid loot hunts. I always hated trying to find that last piece of loot in the first two games, and picking up worthless items and having to drop them silently (which was often difficult if you haven't blackjacked the people around you). This game fixes that problem. Also, I think it's cool that Garrett is such a bad-ass thief that he can see valuable items twinkle, even in the dark. I see it like a 6th sense thing.

the mist 'o level loads completely take you out of the game,

The cut-apart levels are bad, and the misty-hallway transitions don't work well. The levels aren't constrictingly small like that other game, but the level transitions really do detract.

there are ridiculous amounts of loot in the game (finished with over $40K),

You're complaining as a thief that there's TOO MUCH loot? This, to me, is the main sign that you're being too critical of the game, Ray. I suppose it would help if there was more to do with the loot, but I'm enjoying cleaning out every level I come across.

the NPCs magically respawn,

In town between levels? The reason the people "respawn" is because days are passing. I think it would be far more rediculous to blackjack people in town and then the next day they're still lying there (or worse, the town is empty for the rest of the game). Perhaps you're talking about something else that I just haven't gotten to yet.

the AI occasionally just wigs out, etc.

The AI does have some problems. I think they should crank up the awareness on the AI, since they're too easy to fool and hide from. Also, if you don't want to be the sneaky type, it's too easy to go someplace that the AI can't reach and pick them off one by one while they just stand there. In general, the AI has been decent for me. The difficulty in this game really comes from self-imposed rules for thieving since the AI is way too easy to hide from, even when they're actively searching for you, though.

The game has so many good points. The sound is excellent, the atmosphere awesome, the interactive-story components are top notch, the voice acting is great, and I could go on. It's not a revolution or an evolution of the series or genre, but it's really worth buying, and a Thief fan shouldn't pass up this game. And finally the fire arrows are affected by gravity!

Ahh, I knew this was going to be a great day all around. Couldn't ask for more.

Here's some advice for your sales job interview:

Don't be yourself.

If anyone needs a translation, allow me:

nin: "RW is infombr"

nin: "You can't poct thut"

rw: "Fight the opporsium"

rw: "Bivey"

the question was a way to use them from a CD that didn't involve installing them all seperately

You already have the executables, so just write a script to run them all for you, and if you want the process completely automated, create an autorun.inf for the cd that runs the script when the cd goes in.

The simplest (i.e., most primitive) way is to put all the executables in a batch file (open notepad, insert text, save with a .bat extension). Windows Update unpacks everything into crazy long subdirectories, so if you had them on a cd, your batch file would look like:

\WU\Software\ ... \NDP10_SP_Q322038_Cs.exe
\WU\Software\ ... \NDP10_SP_Q322039_Ct.exe

etc etc... When you run the batch file, it'll execute the first program, wait for it to finish, then execute the second, and so on.

Now the trick is to make it completely user-free. I downloaded a couple patches, but I couldn't install them because I already had them installed so I couldn't try the following, but I think it will work. If you just run the patches, they'll probably prompt you to accept the license agreement or something and you don't want to sit there waiting around to press 'enter' or whatever. I think if you provide the /q parameter after the filename when running the patch then it'll run in quiet mode (at least it doesn't complain when you give it /q) and just do everything by itself.

So you'd put in your batch file:

\WU\Software\ ... \NDP10_SP_Q322038_Cs.exe /q
\WU\Software\ ... \NDP10_SP_Q322039_Ct.exe /q

Now like I said, I can't actually run the patches to test this method because I already have the patches installed, but I think /q should do it since that's kind of a Microsoft standard in a lot of things. If that doesn't work, though, note that the patch files are actually self-extracting CAB files. Get a program (I use WinRAR) that can extract the CAB files so you actually get the .msp patch file. If you extract the patch, you'll actually get 3 files, like so:

NDP10_SP_Q322039_Ct.exe expands to:
ApplyPatch.exe
NDP10_SP_Q322039_Ct.msp
QuietApplyPatch.exe

So I bet if you run QuietApplyPatch, it'll do what the /q is supposed to do above. So you'd end up putting these QuietApplyPatch executables in your batch file and then of course you'd put the batch file in an autorun.inf so when you put in a cd, it'd run all the patches silently without user intervention.

I didn't really find any info in a brief search on the internet, but there's my guess for you. Simply running a bunch of executables in order is trivial, so it's finding the documentation on how Microsoft packages their patches is the tricky part.

I'm probably dating myself, but in the good ol' days we simply didn't show those films to the young'uns.

Well, yes, but back in your day you also had to walk to school barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways. These days we have technology, and technology allows for us to add more options to life instead of everything being a binary decision.

it's also another example of people not wanting to take responsibility for what their kids watch.

How so? These parents are paying a monthly fee to make sure that they're in total control of what gets shown to their kids. How on earth are they not wanting to take responsibility?! Because they're letting a machine filter the scenes? Would it somehow be better if they sat there with the remote control and skipped the scenes themselves?