Haha. 
This is a pretty good review, BTW:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/games/a- ... oshock.ars
Pretty much sums up how I feel about the game and its beautiful atmosphere. I really loved the intro where you have this huge entrance in the middle of the sea; reminded me of the way into the underwater template in Zelda: Wind Waker.
The premise, concept and execution is in general coolness squared. 
God, the guy who made the widescreen hack is getting a free GeForce 8800 for it.
But yeah, I totally agree with the essence of that post. The whole thing is getting totally overblown, and in all honesty I bet the majority of those bitching about it wouldn't have had any problems even if they did buy it legally on the PC.
While these copyright things are kind of suspicious, it's not hard to blame them for trying to fight back when people have been flagrantly pirating the absolute fuck out of PC games for years.
These people who say they're only pirating to make a stand against the copyright stuff? Absolute bollocks. They pirate anyway, and have done for years. The only reason the companies are taking more drastic measures is because their software is getting thrown all over BitTorrent hours after release.
You nutter.
Sennheiser headphones definitely sit in the top bracket of quality, but another thing they're excellent for is how user-fixable they are. The entire thing can basically be taken apart by hand with most models, meaning you can buy and install a replacement for essentially any part.
The most useful in my opinion is the removable cord, which simply pops out of the headphone if pulled and is like a tiny normal audio cable (ie: the ones you put into your sound card). I often yank them by accident and this saves otherwise guaranteed damage, and after two years one side died and I was able to just get a new cord for like £10 and perfectly restore them. 
Oh man, I forgot about the figurine.
No idea where I'll put it, but I can't say no to cheap merchandise. Better order.
The piracy crap is pretty concerning, and further proves that the only people it hurts are the consumers. Unless pirates really can't crack it very easily (they almost certainly can).
As with music, if a pirate has decided they're going to pirate it, they will indeed pirate it. I don't agree with piracy as a general rule, but certain companies do almost force it on people at times.
2K seems to be making that mistake with BioShock. Hopefully it'll work fine when I do actually get it though as I've never experience problems with this stuff before.
What makes you think VGChartz isn't reliable? The fact you've personally never come across them before, and have no idea how legitimate they are? Or do you have some kind of evidence to support them being inaccurate?
If anything, them not being affiliated with the companies themselves is more likely to ensure their accuracy, as the companies typically factor the shipping number into their general sales count (ie: units sold to shops).
If you go after NPD figures (as official as you're going to get) you'll find they do support the Wii overtake. Magazines have been consequently saying for months it's imminent.
Let us know if you ever do. I wouldn't mind being a bit more relaxed when playing PC games, but don't really want to risk a wad of cash on it when it could not be that good.
Headphones can go up into many hundreds, Koko. Although a lot of people aren't too bothered, the quality can easily match high-end speaker equipment at a fraction of the price; although I personally love my speakers and subwoofer, high-end headphones are a great alternative to the heart-stopping power I get for people who want a bit more privacy or need to not disturb the neighbours.
I personally use a pair of Sennheiser HD595 headphones, which sit towards the top of the Sennheiser line just before the point where they hit the 'uber expensive' area. They don't have the gimmicks of surround sound (kind of pointless for people wanting quality headphones IMO) or a microphone, but the pure quality is immense. 'You can hear the breath of the singer between lyrics' immense.
Do some equalisation (or just play with the bass/treble, which is a simplified equaliser (EQ)) and you got yourself bst sound evr~~~.
Quote from MazyDoes look slightly crisper than the 360 version, but dammit I wanna lie down while playing!
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mice_ ... 3&cl=gb,en
It's just like another Second Live, except without the building and shit.
Seems a bit to me.
Oh, of course. You're right. I totally forgot what a shadowed building looks like; I guess I must be wrong, and am in no position to criticise.
It's more the way the shadow affects the objects/people/etc inside it that looks off to me. Look at the car and the man. Look at the lack of shadowing beneath them that they should be casting.
It's just a bit iffy.
I meant the big shaded area on the left side of the street. The lighting in it seems really bland and flat.
I have to say the screenshot doesn't overwhelm me that much, though. Like the original Mafia it looks competent for sure, but 'beautiful' really isn't a word I'd use to describe it. It's just a decent interpretation of an old-style city -- not much style or imagination there.
Incidentally, I got a bit confused when setting my graphic options. If you've got the appropriate PC, 'Force Global Lighting' should actually be set to OFF for the best lighting; apparently it lessens or disables the dynamic/reflective lighting if set to ON.
Kind of confused me as OFF is on the left I think, and you'd normally associate 'left' with 'worst' when it comes to PC graphic options.
Also, some cool 360/PC screenshot comparisons for those interested here:
Although technology does move forward quickly, it's important to not be blinded to the reality by the future prospects.
At the moment, almost the entire UK is networked together using copper lines for its internet. Although fibre-optic lines do exist, only one ISP actually uses them, and they happen to be a bit shit.
As such, the maximum you can realistically get on a general basis in this country is around 24mb/s, and this isn't going to change any time soon. It'll involve a massive restructuring with an unbelievable budget. Note that this is megabits, not megabytes; the actual download rate would be about 2 megabytes a second.
Although some countries are better off than this sorry state of affairs, most aren't that much so. Copper lines are still relied on widely, and even the fastest consumer broadband isn't anywhere near capable of delivering a 50GB file (and this will grow again once the next storage medium arrives) in the same speed it takes to plop in a disc.
And even if you do overcome the connection hurdle, wireless networking is another obstacle as I mentioned above. A brand new generation of wireless is currently in draft format (802.11n), replacing 802.11g.
The existing technology, G, only supports around 54mb/s. The upcoming technology typically supports around 100mb/s, with a theoretically maximum of around 250mb/s that will in all likelihood never be reached. Again, we're talking about megabits here, not megabytes. The actual rate the file would transfer would be about 25 megabytes per second -- that's one long transfer for 50GB.
It's going to be difficult for digital distribution to climb over the fundamental transfer issues it faces, make no mistake. Years of wireless network development (still based on radio waves, of course) has still only gotten us to an average of 100mb/s, and internet connectivity continues to drag on.
The simple fact is that ye olde game shop is far from dead, and the simple act of buying and owning a disc will be with us for a long time.
Make sure you've got the brand new NVIDIA beta drivers (or they may be non-beta, not sure). They were specifically released to address compatibility and performance issues with BioShock.
The magic number is 163.44. They'll be on Guru3D.com, and they've also been included next to downloads of the game/demo quite widely.
Ace.
The lighting in the shadow areas is kind of ass, though. Hopefully will be fixed. 
No, but since I do work at an Internets company I absorb an amount of information with a magnitude that God himself would be envious of, which when matched with the intelligence of Jesus and Satan combined makes me a superbly knowledgeable individual.
Amazing atmosphere; the whole unveiling of the city is truly something special, and delivered with mastery. They did an absolutely amazing job of littering the environment with signs of a once thriving, friendly city that's completely gone wrong -- it was that kind of thing that made stuff like Black Mesa and the System Shock space station cool.
I kept getting completely bummed in the gob right at the end of the demo, though.
Hopefully when I get back off holiday on like September 8th a patch will have fixed some of the bollocks like the widescreen controversy and the weird-feeling mouse on some PCs (acceleration problem I think).
If past generations are anything to go by, I'm guessing it won't be until there's reasonably widespread adoption of the existing players.
I don't about the US, but in the case of the UK the adoption seems to be around the region of 'non-existent', PS3 owners excluded.
Wtf. I check Mapcore twelve million times every day and didn't see it. Clearly I am going blind.
