Pretty good. The dinner overall needed more Norm McDonald.

Bill Cosby fap material.

In response to this, as per usual, the goalposts are already being shifted.

Yeah, this sucks HARD. I bought one game over PSN as a one off type thing (I had to have Resident Evil 2 on my PSP, rarrgghh) years ago, and now I gotta worry about this? Is it true they used no encryption whatsoever for storing user info? Fucking TEXT files Sony, really?

The fact that they waited 5 whole days to tell anyone really makes me doubt whether they're being totally honest with what they have told us. I truly feel for you PS3 owners, hope everything turns out OK.

In regards to Crosswords wondering if there's more than one way to solve the puzzles in Portal 2, I'd say yes, but not to the same degree as the first game in my experience (played the single-player 3 times now). Many test chambers require one specific solution with not much room for creative puzzle solving, well, besides the trial and error process of figuring a puzzle out; it seems that the introduction of all these new mechanics (the three kinds of gel, hard-light walkways, forward/backward tractor beams, faith plates, etc.) cumulatively make for much more specific solutions with less room for player delineation from the designer's intended sequence of events to complete them. So, the instances of forging your own path are there, just not as abundant as in the original. The puzzles themselves are varied enough to make repeat playthroughs still enjoyable, imo. The fantastic sense of atmosphere and thoughtful level/sound design, writing, and story also help.

I haven't played the co-op yet, so no clue on that front.

About the DLC stuff, it seems likely Valve will soon release more level packs, hopefully free. It would make no sense to spend dev resources making paid hats/gestures/doo-hickies if all there is to enjoy them in is the out-of-the-box coop campaign. It would be a smart move to counterbalance paid, non-vital cosmetic stuff with more meaty-but-free maps to ensure a vital and thriving community, a less disgruntled one at that. Valve is usually good about making the essential stuff free, and the paid optional stuff at least theoretically attainable through other means (if TF2 is any indication, also Portal 2 hats/gestures are able to be Found by playing/achievements a la TF2, not sure to what capacity though).

Some advanced chambers of the single-player stuff and a Challenge mode would be nice too. But I digress, we'll see which direction Valve takes it soon enough! Just an already happy customer thinking out loud about how Valve could make it even betterer than it already is.

I guess it depends on what type of round is needed. Kinetic rounds are meant to apply maximum force to the smallest possible surface area of a heavily armored target, usually composite armor where conventional rounds are ineffective. The sheer impact force alone and resultant heat and shrapnel, not to mention pressure wave that would likely suck any fleshy humanoids within (after turning them into a viscous red paste) right out the exit hole Alien Resurrection style, would probably do the trick.

Or so I vaguely recall being told from a friend with related experience 'blowing shit up' in an M1A1. I might be a bit off on the particulars. Or he might've been just 'making shit up'. >> ^Asmo:

I'd say the final round will need to be able to deliver the force to the target, so they'll want something that won't punch through, but transfer all of the force of it's arrival in to the target.

>> ^kceaton1:

I consider the best creature ever to be the Alien. No CGI. The damn thing elicits fear.


Less is more!

I think Cameron's Terminator 2 is a good example of shrewd use of CGI where absolutely needed and no more. Watching the 'making of' stuff for T2, I was amazed at how things that I thought were obvious CGI were actually not.

Yeah, this Mark character is a repeat caller. I remember well the gently kind & considerate yet logically devastating throttling he received at the hands of Jen and Tracey. Looks like they may have gotten through to him on some level, after all.

Is it still masturbation if it's with someone else's hand? 😉

Couldn't the appearance of a low framerate be possibly attributable to the poor framerate of the video recording itself?

There's gotta be a higher quality capture somewhere...I seem to remember watching this Macworld originally on Apple's Quicktime site in much higher quality (though it may have been just the keynote speech).

Exciting times, they were. This was the video that convinced me (at the time) that Halo was going to be the next step in emergent, open-worldy type shooters. It really looked like you could drive for miles and miles and really explore the space. I was huge into Starsiege Tribes at the time so seeing those huge open spaces in a more single-player, exploratory context really blew me away. Still sorta impressive.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

Or you can just wait a year for your burnable media to erase itself.


Or you can just re-burn them... this time with fire.

CANNOT. FRICKING. WAIT.

With the imminent release of Portal 2 and subsequent buildup of hype reaching critical mass, am I the only nerd who thought this was initially Half-Life/Portal related?

@bmacs27

Touché, madam.

@Psychologic

Both of these positions are unsupportable because they claim knowledge of something unobservable. We can neither test for presence nor absence.

Agreed. I should have worked the word "probabilistic" somewhere into "a provisional designation of non-existence"; I sorta failed in trying to impress the somewhat tentative nature of my disbelief. I have varying beliefs, each with varying degrees of certainty, all of them provisional and subject to change based on new evidence; basically Richard Feynman's brilliantly communicated (and easily comprehended by literally anyone) response to the question of "not knowing" as seen in The Pleasure of Find Things Out.

I wanted to address some of your response bmacs, but I'm hard on time/energy. Maybe later!