All the latest news
Bleh, not a lot, actually.
On second (third? fourth?) edit there IS rather a bit of stuff here today.
I have given up on RSVP, who have been sending me crap links for months now, and never replied to any emails in regards to some of their categories (ie, 'arts/design/creative' is not possible as career according to RSVP) and pricing (blatant rip off). As I have said before, online dating is dead.
That didn't stop me from joing match.com which appears to be more of the same. I have all the matches I want from Ecuador, Nigeria, Laos, Guatemala, Columbia and, for some bizzarre reason, Canada. NONE of which fall into my definition of '50km from Meadowbank'. People STILL don't reply to emails you send them, despite the fact that the privellege of sending costs some serious money. I should have just subscribed to New Scientist and been done with it - a better way of spending cash I think.
Please, feel free to provide feedback, as I am quite clearly ugly/boring/undesirable enough to warrant attention only from gold-digging skanks from 3rd world countries (sorry, Canada). I haven't had ANY links from anyone even living in Australia! Oh, just found out the frelling link doesn't work if you aren't a member, so this link will have to do.
In other, more exciting news, there might actually be some decent PC games appearing over the next few months, GTA:SA being the last really good game to come out, with NWN before that. BF1942 has been played to death by the GamezDudez, though the young'uns are soldiering on in Star Wars Battlefront. Most new games (BF2 comes to mind) have gone way too far down the track of complexity, and have lost the sheer time-eating simple joys of Unreal Tournament. I don't think we've given UT2004 quite enough time, though, as it does retain that special, silky-smooth, run-run-run-ROCKET-run-run-jump-FLAKCANNON-run-run-run-HEADSHOT-runrunrunrunrunrun-M-M-M-M-Monsterkil! goodness. The teams maps though, heeerrrrmmmmm, you could not have 'em and it wouldn't be a great loss.
The new hopefuls? Well, NeverwinterNights 2, and (at long last!) Jade Empire for the PC! Hurrah! Hopefully a bit of multiplayer goodness will find it's way into JE-PC, so we can finally act out our Wolf & Cub vs. One-armed Boxer vs. Drunken Master vs. Flying Guillotine fantasies. Well, we being Bear & me, anyway. With some persuading I hope to get the legendary Sabyr to actually put pen to paper and do some writing so we can make some NWN2 mods and fling us to fame & fortune as game writers rather than... whatever the hell it is we do now.
While on the topic of gamez, it is about bloody time someone came up with a decent space-shooter. Hello? Anyone? The last Great Space Game was X-Wing Alliance; while it still runs it ain't pretty due to changes in DirectX technology, and requires a plethora of fan-made (ie, mostly crap) tweaks, edits and hacks to get the damn thing to run. The resulting kludgy mess just isn't worth it. I don't ask for much - X3 Reunion nearly gets there, except for the massive number of bugs, graphics slowdowns, lack of plot, fucking StarFarce protection, wacky German sci-fi (they brought us Lexx - get the idea?), character names that sound shit-hot in 'Cherman' but just SHIT in English (Ban Dana? Who the hell names a main character BAN DANA? You may as well just call him Ret Ardo, Dich Ead or B'Lau M'e Orfwan Ker. I suppose 'bandana' translates into Cherman as 'uberkopfenmichtelscarvenruundenknutische' and everything makes sense.), and a universe composed of solar systems 15km across, arranged in right-angles in a galaxy of nearly 30 stars! Whoop-de-fucking-do. You have to go waaay back to Frontier 2 to get a decent universe - a fractally generated galaxy, with realistic solar systems (well, apart from the number of them), a laudable if ultimately flawed attempt at Newtonian sub-light travel, and enough action for more than an afternoon's diversion. OK, granted it was released half-finished, fatally riddled with bugs and was made to look good by the abysmal demon that was Battlecruiser. (I have an original of that - I am hoping it will be worth serious money in 20 years time).
OK, so here are my demands:
1. Dogfighting - it needs to look like the new series of Battlestar Galactica.
2. Graphics - It's SPACE. It's EMPTY! We can put a pile-o-shit onscreen in things like BF2, so are some decent ships, planets, nebula too much to ask? And give us an OPTION to TURN OFF the fucking lame 'twinkly-flying-specks' to show movement. They made sense in the C64 version of Elite, but NEVER SINCE THEN. (You hear me, Egosoft?)
3. Space is big, really big. SO MAKE IT BIG! Fractal galaxies! Black holes! Neutron stars! Wolf-rayet stars! Freeware authors can model EVERY star in the local sector of the Galaxy (Orbiter & Celestia), so what is stopping game authors? They are all lazy.
4. Trade. Geez, it could be as simple as Elite and we would be happy. If it was as good as Frontier we would be happy. We don't need to model EVERY STEP OF INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION! EGOSOFT! Are you even listening? If I wanted to do accounting I would wear a suit - NOT BUY A GAME!
5. Some plot would be nice. See: Ultima 4, Planescape Torment, HalfLife, HalfLife 2, Halo, I-war, I-war 2, ANY of the Final Fantasy series, but 7, 8 & 10 for starters, heck, even Star Wars would be a good start. Bloody hell, Gyruss has a better plot than most space games these days.
6. Test the game before you release it! Egosoft! YOU AGAIN!
7. Have a good hard look at I-war 2 - it is damn close to being perfect, it just didn't have the universe to match it's glorious graphics.
8. Fuck, why do we bother? Just go and make ANOTHER lame FPS / MMORG / Mario Bros / TV tie-in / sports-game-for-EA. Oh, and read some history books about why the video games industry in the early 80's died horribly. Nintendo, despite the ongoing perversion that is Mario, you are exempt due to the delightful DS and Revolution (though you had to spoil that by calling it 'Wii'. HINT: marketing people are not REAL people. They are now laughing at you from their mansions in Monaco).
More news, my dream this morning invloved looking for houses for Bear & Syn in suburbs that don't exist but looked rather nice, accompanied by my dear cat, Kimba, sadly gone to the Big Sunny Warm Place With Furry Things To Chase many years ago. It was good to see him again, he has learnt to say 'kangaroo!' along with his previous 'arro!', 'auh-woggle' & 'gug'. There was also a roadside table next to an antique-shop/pub that had steam engines on it, though they didn't have my one that got stolen.
Crap, this is looking like a diary entry! No rants... OH wait! (Apart from the previous one..)
OK, two guys down a mine. Yeah, OK, but why does EVERY FUCKING THING these days turn into a marketing op / reality TV show? I'm thinking YOU Sustagen! There, I've mentioned your name, where's my $1 million? Occassionally I haven't left my workplace for days at a time too, you know! As for the Ip-ods I would have loved to see the 954m extension cables they used to get around the PATHETIC battery time they have! "Hey guys, it's going to take 10 days to dig you out, but is it OK if we spend 30 minutes drilling a hole big enough to get some product placement in?" It would have been better to give them Sony Minidisc players. Mind you they would have still needed 6 alkaline AA cells each to cover the 320 hours (you get about 60 hours out of an AA with an MD player - stick THAT in your junta, Apple!). It's a shame Eddie McGuire couldn't have been there for the collapse, especially under it; though on the bright side that awful Richard Carlton media-frenzied himself to death. For some wierd reason they didn't stick cameras in his face as he lay dying - I am sure he would have! Caviar won't help you now, MAAAAYYYYTE! (note to self: expect PBL hitmen to beat the shit out me / sue the shit out of me later this afternoon...)
Speaking of conspiracy theories, I noticed some new signage on Shitty Rail stations this morning - both Meadowbank and King's Crass - "You are under video surveillance and your conversation will be recorded". I kid you not. I suppose at least they are honest, though we are just that little bit closer to the world of V for Vendetta, Brazil and A Very British Coup. Seig Heil! John Howard mein Furher!
Wow! What a rant that turned out to be! Hurrah!
Here's the text to my Match.com entry. I try to be honest, rather than fill those boxes up with bullshit I don't believe.
Race Caucasian
Marital status Single
Children 0
Religion None
Drinking Light/social drinker
Smoking Non Smoker
Food Non Vegetarian
Occupation Construction (again, no 'art/design/creative' )
Education Bachelors Degree
Languages Mandarin (Minimal) English (Fluent)
Interests Food and Wine, Cooking, Movies / Cinema, Computers / Internet, Sailing / Boating, Motor Racing, Football / Soccer / Rugby, Cricket, Literature / History, Music - World, Music - New Age, Music - Blues/Jazz, Music - Alternative, Museums / Galleries, Arts / Crafts, Nature
How daunting!
Sydney born and bred (North shore, but now living midwest!). By profession I am an architect; I never really got past Lego. I can find my way around a PC (otherwise would not be here!), and enjoy building pretty much anything and tinkering with things. I have travelled to every continent except Africa, Sth America and Antarctica. Have spent some time working in China, so I know how to order a meal in Mandarin (at least, I think I am ordering a meal!). Leanings in books & films tend towards sci-fi. I enjoy pretty much any sport that does not get scored for artistic talent & invloves cruelty to animals. Favourite sports are sailing / soccer (playing) and cricket, F1, occasional RL (watching). I haven't yet found a food I don't like.
Appearance
Eye colour Brown
Hair colour Auburn
Body type Average
Height 5'2"-5'6" (157cm-169cm)
Short, fair, average.
Everyone wants tall, dark and handsome. Sorry, I'm none of those.
If you are interested in honest, caring & loving you're in luck!
I have been told I look like Harrison Ford when I smile, which I guess makes me a scruffy-looking nerf-herder!
Looking for
Gender Female
Age from 25
Age to 40
Looking For Romance, Relationship, Marriage
Between 23 and 38 years old from within 50 km of Meadowbank, New South Wales, replies to emails, is honest, caring, loving and understands that sometimes doing nothing is the best thing to do. Ideal partner is also bemused as to what to write in these darn text boxes.
On second (third? fourth?) edit there IS rather a bit of stuff here today.
I have given up on RSVP, who have been sending me crap links for months now, and never replied to any emails in regards to some of their categories (ie, 'arts/design/creative' is not possible as career according to RSVP) and pricing (blatant rip off). As I have said before, online dating is dead.
That didn't stop me from joing match.com which appears to be more of the same. I have all the matches I want from Ecuador, Nigeria, Laos, Guatemala, Columbia and, for some bizzarre reason, Canada. NONE of which fall into my definition of '50km from Meadowbank'. People STILL don't reply to emails you send them, despite the fact that the privellege of sending costs some serious money. I should have just subscribed to New Scientist and been done with it - a better way of spending cash I think.
Please, feel free to provide feedback, as I am quite clearly ugly/boring/undesirable enough to warrant attention only from gold-digging skanks from 3rd world countries (sorry, Canada). I haven't had ANY links from anyone even living in Australia! Oh, just found out the frelling link doesn't work if you aren't a member, so this link will have to do.
In other, more exciting news, there might actually be some decent PC games appearing over the next few months, GTA:SA being the last really good game to come out, with NWN before that. BF1942 has been played to death by the GamezDudez, though the young'uns are soldiering on in Star Wars Battlefront. Most new games (BF2 comes to mind) have gone way too far down the track of complexity, and have lost the sheer time-eating simple joys of Unreal Tournament. I don't think we've given UT2004 quite enough time, though, as it does retain that special, silky-smooth, run-run-run-ROCKET-run-run-jump-FLAKCANNON-run-run-run-HEADSHOT-runrunrunrunrunrun-M-M-M-M-Monsterkil! goodness. The teams maps though, heeerrrrmmmmm, you could not have 'em and it wouldn't be a great loss.
The new hopefuls? Well, NeverwinterNights 2, and (at long last!) Jade Empire for the PC! Hurrah! Hopefully a bit of multiplayer goodness will find it's way into JE-PC, so we can finally act out our Wolf & Cub vs. One-armed Boxer vs. Drunken Master vs. Flying Guillotine fantasies. Well, we being Bear & me, anyway. With some persuading I hope to get the legendary Sabyr to actually put pen to paper and do some writing so we can make some NWN2 mods and fling us to fame & fortune as game writers rather than... whatever the hell it is we do now.
While on the topic of gamez, it is about bloody time someone came up with a decent space-shooter. Hello? Anyone? The last Great Space Game was X-Wing Alliance; while it still runs it ain't pretty due to changes in DirectX technology, and requires a plethora of fan-made (ie, mostly crap) tweaks, edits and hacks to get the damn thing to run. The resulting kludgy mess just isn't worth it. I don't ask for much - X3 Reunion nearly gets there, except for the massive number of bugs, graphics slowdowns, lack of plot, fucking StarFarce protection, wacky German sci-fi (they brought us Lexx - get the idea?), character names that sound shit-hot in 'Cherman' but just SHIT in English (Ban Dana? Who the hell names a main character BAN DANA? You may as well just call him Ret Ardo, Dich Ead or B'Lau M'e Orfwan Ker. I suppose 'bandana' translates into Cherman as 'uberkopfenmichtelscarvenruundenknutische' and everything makes sense.), and a universe composed of solar systems 15km across, arranged in right-angles in a galaxy of nearly 30 stars! Whoop-de-fucking-do. You have to go waaay back to Frontier 2 to get a decent universe - a fractally generated galaxy, with realistic solar systems (well, apart from the number of them), a laudable if ultimately flawed attempt at Newtonian sub-light travel, and enough action for more than an afternoon's diversion. OK, granted it was released half-finished, fatally riddled with bugs and was made to look good by the abysmal demon that was Battlecruiser. (I have an original of that - I am hoping it will be worth serious money in 20 years time).
OK, so here are my demands:
1. Dogfighting - it needs to look like the new series of Battlestar Galactica.
2. Graphics - It's SPACE. It's EMPTY! We can put a pile-o-shit onscreen in things like BF2, so are some decent ships, planets, nebula too much to ask? And give us an OPTION to TURN OFF the fucking lame 'twinkly-flying-specks' to show movement. They made sense in the C64 version of Elite, but NEVER SINCE THEN. (You hear me, Egosoft?)
3. Space is big, really big. SO MAKE IT BIG! Fractal galaxies! Black holes! Neutron stars! Wolf-rayet stars! Freeware authors can model EVERY star in the local sector of the Galaxy (Orbiter & Celestia), so what is stopping game authors? They are all lazy.
4. Trade. Geez, it could be as simple as Elite and we would be happy. If it was as good as Frontier we would be happy. We don't need to model EVERY STEP OF INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION! EGOSOFT! Are you even listening? If I wanted to do accounting I would wear a suit - NOT BUY A GAME!
5. Some plot would be nice. See: Ultima 4, Planescape Torment, HalfLife, HalfLife 2, Halo, I-war, I-war 2, ANY of the Final Fantasy series, but 7, 8 & 10 for starters, heck, even Star Wars would be a good start. Bloody hell, Gyruss has a better plot than most space games these days.
6. Test the game before you release it! Egosoft! YOU AGAIN!
7. Have a good hard look at I-war 2 - it is damn close to being perfect, it just didn't have the universe to match it's glorious graphics.
8. Fuck, why do we bother? Just go and make ANOTHER lame FPS / MMORG / Mario Bros / TV tie-in / sports-game-for-EA. Oh, and read some history books about why the video games industry in the early 80's died horribly. Nintendo, despite the ongoing perversion that is Mario, you are exempt due to the delightful DS and Revolution (though you had to spoil that by calling it 'Wii'. HINT: marketing people are not REAL people. They are now laughing at you from their mansions in Monaco).
More news, my dream this morning invloved looking for houses for Bear & Syn in suburbs that don't exist but looked rather nice, accompanied by my dear cat, Kimba, sadly gone to the Big Sunny Warm Place With Furry Things To Chase many years ago. It was good to see him again, he has learnt to say 'kangaroo!' along with his previous 'arro!', 'auh-woggle' & 'gug'. There was also a roadside table next to an antique-shop/pub that had steam engines on it, though they didn't have my one that got stolen.
Crap, this is looking like a diary entry! No rants... OH wait! (Apart from the previous one..)
OK, two guys down a mine. Yeah, OK, but why does EVERY FUCKING THING these days turn into a marketing op / reality TV show? I'm thinking YOU Sustagen! There, I've mentioned your name, where's my $1 million? Occassionally I haven't left my workplace for days at a time too, you know! As for the Ip-ods I would have loved to see the 954m extension cables they used to get around the PATHETIC battery time they have! "Hey guys, it's going to take 10 days to dig you out, but is it OK if we spend 30 minutes drilling a hole big enough to get some product placement in?" It would have been better to give them Sony Minidisc players. Mind you they would have still needed 6 alkaline AA cells each to cover the 320 hours (you get about 60 hours out of an AA with an MD player - stick THAT in your junta, Apple!). It's a shame Eddie McGuire couldn't have been there for the collapse, especially under it; though on the bright side that awful Richard Carlton media-frenzied himself to death. For some wierd reason they didn't stick cameras in his face as he lay dying - I am sure he would have! Caviar won't help you now, MAAAAYYYYTE! (note to self: expect PBL hitmen to beat the shit out me / sue the shit out of me later this afternoon...)
Speaking of conspiracy theories, I noticed some new signage on Shitty Rail stations this morning - both Meadowbank and King's Crass - "You are under video surveillance and your conversation will be recorded". I kid you not. I suppose at least they are honest, though we are just that little bit closer to the world of V for Vendetta, Brazil and A Very British Coup. Seig Heil! John Howard mein Furher!
Wow! What a rant that turned out to be! Hurrah!
Here's the text to my Match.com entry. I try to be honest, rather than fill those boxes up with bullshit I don't believe.
Race Caucasian
Marital status Single
Children 0
Religion None
Drinking Light/social drinker
Smoking Non Smoker
Food Non Vegetarian
Occupation Construction (again, no 'art/design/creative' )
Education Bachelors Degree
Languages Mandarin (Minimal) English (Fluent)
Interests Food and Wine, Cooking, Movies / Cinema, Computers / Internet, Sailing / Boating, Motor Racing, Football / Soccer / Rugby, Cricket, Literature / History, Music - World, Music - New Age, Music - Blues/Jazz, Music - Alternative, Museums / Galleries, Arts / Crafts, Nature
How daunting!
Sydney born and bred (North shore, but now living midwest!). By profession I am an architect; I never really got past Lego. I can find my way around a PC (otherwise would not be here!), and enjoy building pretty much anything and tinkering with things. I have travelled to every continent except Africa, Sth America and Antarctica. Have spent some time working in China, so I know how to order a meal in Mandarin (at least, I think I am ordering a meal!). Leanings in books & films tend towards sci-fi. I enjoy pretty much any sport that does not get scored for artistic talent & invloves cruelty to animals. Favourite sports are sailing / soccer (playing) and cricket, F1, occasional RL (watching). I haven't yet found a food I don't like.
Appearance
Eye colour Brown
Hair colour Auburn
Body type Average
Height 5'2"-5'6" (157cm-169cm)
Short, fair, average.
Everyone wants tall, dark and handsome. Sorry, I'm none of those.
If you are interested in honest, caring & loving you're in luck!
I have been told I look like Harrison Ford when I smile, which I guess makes me a scruffy-looking nerf-herder!
Looking for
Gender Female
Age from 25
Age to 40
Looking For Romance, Relationship, Marriage
Between 23 and 38 years old from within 50 km of Meadowbank, New South Wales, replies to emails, is honest, caring, loving and understands that sometimes doing nothing is the best thing to do. Ideal partner is also bemused as to what to write in these darn text boxes.
Read more!
posted by Corinoco at 1:03 pm
3 comments
