Posts by Thrik

Yeah, you're going to have to let go a bit when it comes to the finer details. If stuff like the baby's gender bothers you, I'm guessing the bigger changes (of which there'll be many, make no mistake) will send you crazy.

[Blocked Image: http://serve.ryanjohnwilliams.com/images/ban.gif]

They'd just better hope there're no demomen around.

Yeah, I didn't see it back then but I was aware of the date. Intriguing because the articles say it was meant to hit the market this year.

The Samsung Sentry Gun, intended to guard demilitarised zones in Korea (presumably to replace the mines, etc):

[*]
[*:x7njfk7e]Armed with a 5.5-millimeter K3 machine gun
[*:x7njfk7e]Two cameras: one for day-time and one for infrared night vision
[*:x7njfk7e]Can track and identify targets from up to 2.5 miles away in the daytime and about half that distance at night
[*:x7njfk7e]Microphone and speaker system to exchange passwords with human soldiers
[*:x7njfk7e]Capable of picking out a human target and can accurately track/shoot him or her in the heart[/list]http://%7boption%7d

Makes TF2 Engineer's sentries look a bit mediocre. Ought to be hitting the market about now if it hasn't already based on the dates, too.

All they need to do is put it on one of these:

Then it's game over.

YouTube - Wario Land: Shake It – Amazing footage!

It's your operating system that's either 32-bit or 64-bit, not your graphics card. Windows Vista quite explicitly states which it is when you view the computer properties.

Sure, but as I said: if you're looking for pure video conversion there's really no equal to Super. That's why I recommended Super and not VirtualDub.

It's not that VirtualDub is bad — I've used it occasionally for years. It's just that Super does what Jaboo wants much better.

I wouldn't say Virtual Dub comes close, and it's not really a dedicated converter anyway — it doesn't support many formats, including WMV. It's more of a post-processing tool, which Jaboo already has Adobe Premiere for (and that can do it infinitely better).

I'm surprised Premiere can't recognise your files. It definitely supports MPEGs, although I guess that covers a lot of different sub-types.

Anyway, a great program for converting just about any video format to any other video format is Super. It's been around (and evolving) for years, and I really can't think of anything that comes close — particularly considering that it's free.

Quote from Jetsetlemming

Limiting the number of installs to a hard limit is a bullshit thing to do no matter what the number, because as some people online have rightly described it, that's just renting the game then- you can use it for X amount of times and then no longer.

I've seen this 'you're only renting it' argument thrown around a lot, and I think it's important to bear in mind that EA will give you more activations if you phone them. This process is imperfect and should be a free phone number, but it still invalidates the rental argument. At no point will you ever be permanently unable to use your game.

EA aren't crazy enough to slam an unconditional 5-install limit — it's just meant to be an inconvenience. Unfortunately the only people this inconveniences are the legal buyers, because piraters just circumvent it altogether. So once again the age-old argument that DRM only hurts the legitimate consumers stands true.

It might be worth noting that Windows has this same system, in that after several installations on different computers (Or is it just one nowadays?) you have to phone Microsoft for a new activation.

Anyone know if the Steam version of Warhead comes without the DRM? I'd assume so, but just want to be sure. If it does I'll get that version.

Quote from Jetsetlemming

"This gives you the opportunity to install the game as many times as you want on five different machines."Does this mean you can get an activation back by uninstalling?

Yep, further down:

So yeah. I'm cool with this. In Spore you get 5 installations, period, and after that the game's worthless.

Actually, the Spore DRM is being modified within the next week or so to allow deactivations; and the 'install unlimited times on one machine' thing was in place from the beginning. Testing has proven that an activation only counts if it's on a different computer.

Again, Crysis and Spore are using the same DRM. The only difference in Crysis' take is that the relaxed conditions will be there from launch rather than being introduced a bit later like Spore's.

Funny how the specific game can alter people's hostility towards DRM.

One positive note is that EA confirmed the other day that they wouldn't ever let a game become unusable because of some crazy reason like the company going bust (as if), etc. Instead they'd immediately release a DRM-removing patch if for any reason they can't or no longer want to support phone support for additional activations.

Don't take this post as me supporting DRM btw, because I don't. I just think it's important to clarify things because there's a lot of misinformation about EA's DRM floating around.

You only have to validate Spore once to play the game; the 10-day reactivation thing was removed before the game came out. After this you can play without the disc in the drive.

It's also been revealed through testing that Spore actually allows five activations, and that reinstalling on the same computer does not count as an activation.

So yeah, exactly the same stuff.

Pretty much identical DRM to Spore, then.

Everyone gonna boycott this one too?

Pity most of them look about the same.

Never mind Kotaku, it's on Digg now:

http://digg.com/pc_games/Portal_Prelude_Day_Zero

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/ ... ogle-valve

I'd say the notion of Google wanting Steam has some serious credibility, although I'm definitely going to need corroboration from other sites before I believe it. Steam is indeed a fantastic system, and definitely the best in its field at doing what it does — especially now it has the tight social networking integration of Steam Community.

The downside I guess is that Google will inevitably want something out of it. Hopefully that doesn't eventually translate to ads. I was also kind of looking forward to seeing Valve become a serious publishing heavyweight, which I think is very possible considering their current momentum. If this deal does turn out to exist, I hope it doesn't compromise that.

I think it's quite clear that there is no single answer to this question because it's considered differently by different schools of thought.

For every maths boffin that comes in and starts talking about nulls and scales, all I have to do is point out that '0' is an Arabic numeral and thus is inarguably a number in that sense of the word.

Klein wins the thread. To bolster the point though, '0' as in 'zero' is the first of the 10 digits in the Arabic numeral system that most of us use. In the technical sense it's inarguably a number.