Posts by Thrik

Happy birthday you loveable little thing.

Hahaha holy shit, I just tried my nickname in the URL and it turns out I did create a few which I vaguely remember. The 13-year-old me was a disturbed person:

http://www.stripcreator.com/comics/Thrik/62827

http://www.stripcreator.com/comics/Thrik/62848

Not sure how far through I am but I've just returned to my shack to save my friend from some birds. Been really enjoying it so far, although I've only been playing it in very small chunks since it came out. This is probably for the best as the gameplay does get a little repetitive, but the storytelling and other details more than make up for it. I totally love the atmosphere and presentation, and the TV-style endings to chapters are awesome — just encountered the one where it zooms out from the coffee shop girl and pans out over the forest and shit. So cool.

It is bizarre that certain technical issues are present: the lip syncing is poor and the overall animation is occasionally stiff. Given the epic development time you'd think these things would have been spotted and resolved way back.

Fortunately the technical problems don't extend to the graphics. I think this is one of the most atmospheric and immersive games I've played this generation on that front, with the really open environments and superb art direction depicting creepy forests like I've never before encountered in a game — especially when the smoke/fog goes crazy. It's obvious the engine was designed to handle much more ambitious environments than you actually see though (was meant to be open world), with flawlessly huge draw distances and stuff used for little more than adding a bit of wow factor. Very impressive though like when you're up in the cliffs and can see things miles away that you need to get to.

Yeah it should migrate fairly seamlessly, though you probably won't be able to just keep using it as your router will need to be reconfigured for your new ISP (or you just use the one they supply). It will most probably just stop working when you're switched.

Haha that fire video. You can almost feel the panic.

Apparently Shadow of the Colossus' player/horse relationship was the inspiration for The Last Guardian, but yeah when you think about it all three games have that element of strong companionship (amongst other similarities). However I don't believe there's any connection between the games other than them being stylistically very similar — I do recall Shadow of the Colossus being described as Ico's spiritual sequel.

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":3u0d39o9]Ah ah.. I didn't notice your link! I found the teaser a bit weird, the image is very very washed out. I hope the games are not like that, I luvez my contrast.

They are, and their (rather awesome-looking) upcoming game for the PS3 has the same style. It's kind of their signature thing, with the outdoor environments having a sun-bleached watercolour look. I have to admit it did jar with me a little when I first tried SotC, but you quickly learn to appreciate it.

New trailer of their next game hit TGS yesterday btw:

Slow on the draw there HP.

Yeah I treasure the fuck out of my copy of Subsistence, because playing MGS3 with the old-style camera is just downright inferior. So glad I paid top dollar for it when it came out. I'm continuing to hope they do a proper MGS collection though, with the (better IMO) GameCube version of MGS1 included. Some bastard recently

Yeah baby! I got Shadow of the Colossus right at the end of the PS2's life and as I had a PS3 alluring me I never really got into it. Hopefully the re-release will address the technical limitations the original had (low frame rate, blurry textures, resolution) which will be enough for me to get into what is meant to be a very awesome and emotional game.

To be honest I'd feel equally sad if I'd read this story and it was just some random family from the outback, and I'd imagine most people would too. The fact that an enormous statistic of people die every year doesn't take away the emotional significance of any single one of them. Not reacting to every single incident in the world isn't turning a blind eye; it's simply not possible to be aware of and to react to all the horror out there as we'd be emotionally drained. But it's only human to be touched every now and then by stories like this.

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":1vp39do7]Not to be a dick but I really find this funny. Odds are that both the wife and child's are insured and will get a considerable amount of money every month for the death of the parent.Did you ever donated to child care? Did you ever helped those who really need help? Obviously you do whatever you want with your money, I'm not condemning but I'm just finding this... funny.

Err wtf? Its kind of sick you're thinking of this from a purely financial perspective. All the money in the world isn't going to ease the pain of losing a parent or lover -- and anyone with either should easily be able to have compassion for them.

The fact that other children suffer elsewhere is entirely irrelevant. What next, will we be criticised for feeling sorry for dozens of people dying in a plane crash because a much bigger one happened years ago and we don't contribute to the 9/11 fund?

Do want trailer. Could it possibly outmatch the awesomeness of the 2001 edition?

Tragic. Can't believe how retarded the people in the other vehicle were.

I just slashed my wrists

ARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Well the iPhone has quite a big screen as far as phones go, and the iPhone 4 runs at an insane 640x960 which is roughly what numerous current-gen console games do. It was very much possible to appreciate the detail when I gave it a go, and in fact the relatively small screen makes it seem even more impressive because any texture blurriness and whatnot is harder to spot.

Just played it, pretty impressive stuff. A colleague rightly pointed out that the detail will most probably have to diminish significantly once player models and AI make an appearance, but as pure eye candy it's compelling stuff.

I did have difficulty with the two-sticks control scheme though, and much preferred the tap-and-pan method — unfortunately that's not exactly ideal for exciting first-person shooter gameplay, so it wouldn't surprise me if we see this used for adventure/puzzle games and stuff like that instead. You know, Myst-like stuff. Or maybe third-person could work really nicely with the tap control scheme and no/minimal camera control, make a really cinematic adventure game.

It's great that such a robust engine is going to be available for the iPhone, anyway. Opens up so much potential.

I wouldn't ever recommend hosting your own site really. Web hosting companies are specialists and not only are their connections generally rock solid, but they have an infrastructure designed to provide redundancy if machines fail, connections fail, software updates fail, etc. Plus a web server needs updating practically weekly to be secure, there's a lot of technical knowledge needed to get things like PHP and MySQL working (which need to be on a UNIX/Linux server really), and of course if things go wrong outside of business hours there needs to be people around to deal with it. Not to mention the electricity costs of running a server 24/7.

I mean if it's just a small local business and it doesn't really matter if the site goes down for an entire evening, fair enough. But for companies that need to be operating all day every day, this is an area you just shouldn't skimp on. Any business that won't fork out £10–£50 for reliable hosting wants its proverbial head looking at.

If you're in the UK you'll probably be good with UK2. Their offering is very much in line with what US hosts typically offer, rather than the Windows-centric overpriced bollocks you get from most UK hosts. The disk space and bandwidth should be more than adequate, and although I only tested them briefly their performance and uptime seemed stellar. If you're after something more serious and robust (as in it's mission-critical) I can probably suggest others, but you're looking at more money and less bandwidth as the cash goes on server reliability/redundancy and other things instead.

If you're open to US hosts there're many more options, although I would say stay away from Dreamhost. I've extensive experience with them and while their features are great on paper, they're let down by stuffing too many people onto each server which means you can (but not necessarily) end up with a slow-as-mud site and awful uptime. In fact this is something that most web hosts offering crazily high allowances do — particularly those that ever use the word 'unlimited' — so be careful if your site must stay up even if hit by surges of traffic. You usually don't get much breathing room on the hosts that do this, meaning a shitload of traffic from say Kotaku may very well knock you offline.