I'm pretty sure that this project has been linked to before. Not to the bit-tech site but the modders own webpage.

Still, it's a pretty impressive piece of work.

Super Mario Brothers?

Damn, I knew I forgot one (probably more than one). Kudos goes to Dennis Hopper as Koopa for a making an otherwise boring movie vaguely watchable.

TBH I actually liked the old video game movies as they fall under the category "so amazingly cheezy and bad that they are funny"

Wing Commander, Resident Evil and the Tomb Raider movies all fall into this bucket (as do Death Race 2000, Starship Troopers and a number of similar "B" movies)

However, having said that, after reading the synopsis of the Doom movie I'd have to say it wasn't fit to be the cheese underneath Wind Commander's big toe.

back to HL2.. not having to have the CD in the drawer is nice. However the 357 still seems way too powerful. I got smacked down from 100 health 200 shield in two shots.

Just a warning on the Op Ed piece regarding the home theatre in a box vs. compenent system. It's written buy an employee of Polk Audio so don't expect a totally objective article.

About various HL/HL2 mods and accuracy, I'd suggest people try out Firearms. It's a smaller, more tightnit community which means less smacktards and the accuracy model is much much more er.... accurate ... than CS or DoD.

There are three modifiers in accuracy; 1. stance i.e. whether you are standing/running, crouching or prone 2. firemode i.e. full auto, burst or single shot and 3. use of the bipod (which can be used on any flat surface) for the weapons that have it.. m60 and m82 come to mind.

The recoil is also more accurate and predictable, using a gun climb model rather than random boucning or expanding x-hair. Each weapon has a different recoil depending on size and lethality. For example, the uzi has relatively little recoil due to the 9mm ammo but the g3a3 has much more due to the 7.62 ammo is shoots.

The animation of the attaching (well rebuilding) of the mp5 silencer has to be seen to be believed, just don't do while under fire

For the "blue" grav gun you need to SST

use "sv_cheats 1" then "map d3_citadel_03" (pick the gravity gun up after its done zapping your other weapons). Use "changelevel d1_trainstation_01" (or any level you want, just make sure you use the changelevel command, not map). Type give weapon_physcannon to get the blue grav gun or impulse 101 to get all the weapons. The following cvars can be changed to play around with nice stuff like combine armoured cars or pluck the flyeyes from a thousand feet

physcannon_chargetime 0.5 (def 2)
physcannon_maxforce 10000 (def 150)
physcannon_maxmass 10000 (def 250)
physcannon_mega_pullforce 20000 (def 8000)
physcannon_mega_tracelength 10000 (def 850)
physcannon_pullforce 20000 (def 4000)
physcannon_tracelength 10000 (def 250)

Sounds like you're having a rough time of it Warhawk, my sympathies. One of the benefits of having twins is that they actually keep each other company and are less clingy than singletons. Thats not to say that they wont both hang on you at the same time but it happens less often They've been pretty good at sleeping, one wont wake up unless the world is ending (or he hears the word 'breakfast' whispered from the other side of the house) the other is a pretty light sleeper but will go through the night. This means if I'm alone with them in the house I can safely go and put on headphones and game away, they can come and get me if there is a problem.

It sounds pretty heartless but when they went through the nighttime crying phase we just let them get on with it. Eventually they realised that we weren't going to come at their beck and call and that we would still be there in the morning.

I would definitely go and organise a formal date night though. Not only does this help the little one to realise that you have a life of your own but it also helps your wife to realise that its perfectly okay to leave the child for a period of time.. I remember the first time we went out my wife drove the babysitter wild phoning every hour or so.

Wow, thats pretty much my life story too. The only difference is that I have 3 year old twin sons. I'm up at 6am get home from work at 7pm and spend time with the kids then the wife. I usually don't get to start playing computer games until 10/10.30.

My wife prefers thinking/logic style PC games over FPS (e.g. Bookworm, Gem style flash games). She has tried HL and Quake but didn't like them. We also have a PS2 and a GC which sit, unused, in a corner.

I found the best way to put some gaming-time aside is to suggest she go out with her girlfriends. They usually goto the gym once a week and occasionally out for a meal.

Warhawk, you're pretty close to aquiring the grav gun. Like you I can only play for limited amount of time between kid and spousal tantrums but I'm a bit further on, in Nova Prospekt. I'd like to say that, and I'm pretty sure this isn't a spoiler, the Antlions are at the same time the biggest pains in the ass and the coolest damn thing in the game.

You know far more about XP than I do but I just wanted to share an experience I had this year. In April my relatively new PC (4 months old at that time) started to blue screen with Stop errors pointing out problems in various, seemingly unrelated system files. It got so bad that, in the end, I had to move all my important data to my other PC and reformat. Except that Windows wouldn't reinstall.

After much searching on the net and hardware debugging I found out that I had a bad S-ATA cable. One $10 cable later I had a working HD and was able to store data on it. It's often the simplest, most overlooked items that cause the biggest problems

This comment was edited on Oct 8, 10:59.

What browser are you using, IE or Firefox? I'd definitely recommend Firefox if you've never used it.

As for the reboot, make sure that you have turned off the automatic reboot on failure function. Control Panel -> System -> Advanced (tab) -> Startup and Recovery -> Automatically Restart checkbox. This should allow you to actually see the error message that XP returns.

SP2 seems to be okay on my two home PCs.


EDIT: the current fascination with space travel reminds of the early airplane revolution, individual efforts in competitions and racing which eventually turned into the creation of the big commercial manufacturers. May I live to see the day that commercial space travel is realised.
This comment was edited on Oct 8, 09:38.

SS3 would be so fucking incredible I'd be in hog heaven. However, from the tone it isn't that... maybe a prequel ? I hope, at least, that its in the same universe as the SS series.

Of course, Terra Nova 2 would also kickass.

EDIT: you can actually pickup SS and SS2 as abandonware in some places - getting it to run on Win XP is another matter
This comment was edited on Oct 8, 00:31.

I definitely remember seeing this a while back, maybe a year or so ago, but I can't remember where I got it from. I thought it was Blues but maybe not... ah the vagaries of old(er) age.

By the way, I know some people on these boards are into online RPGs. Is anyone here currently playing Kingdom of Loathing http://www.kingdomofloathing.com ? For those that haven't seen it before it's a totally free, web-based RPG... no fancy graphics but with a definte humour all its own.

This comment was edited on Sep 16, 14:29.

Looks like NY Times had a clean out of their database, the ID/PW from this site and also all the ones from bugmenot.com (at least the 10 or so I tried) appear to have been deleted.

Isn't this what the whole QoS system was meant to be used for? To allow for intelligent management of network services? Thus anyone playing a game (which probably only uses 5-10k/s of data) wouldn't be flooded by someone utilising 150k/s for downloading if the game was allowed a set % of available bandwith.

Admittedly QoS is for a single PC but I would be suprised if noone had come up with similar software for use in a soho/home router

Just FYI, the less than risky business link appears to be dead.

If I had to go with a family vehicle I'd sooner hack of my own foot with a rusty saw than buy a minivan. I'd go with a Volvo wagon.

http://www.volvocars.us/

We saw the new X50's and V70's and they were pretty damn nice as a family vehicle goes. Plus you can't beat the safety factor and vehicle life.

Funnily enough the reason I'm angling for a WRX is that the minivan was rear-ended by an older Volvo last week. They wrote of the Volvo but are going to repair the van. Whilst we are getting the van repaired, my wife doesn't want to drive it anymore as she's nervous about it not being as strong as before. Far from disabusing her of this notion I'm selling the WRX as hard as I can

I realised I got old when I signed the check for the Honda Oddessey. However, with twin 2 year old boys the room and the DVD player more than make up for the lack of "coolness" factor. The 240 horses under the hood also make it a respectible goer.

I'm still trying to get my wife to reconsider buying a WRX station wagon though

From what I understand the newer rotary engines don't have that issue. In the older ones the rotor tips wore badly, allowing oil into the combustion cycle, new tip materials and designs overcame that problem.