lacking_imagination

Has anyone played SotC? I just picked it up today, and I have to say... Wow. This is by far the most beautiful game I've played this generation.anyways, a small overview (I'm not far into it, I'll review it when I beat all the colossi)...The game starts out with your character riding his horse to this massive (and beautiful) stone temple, where he places this girl on the altar. He speaks to the God there and askes to have her soul returned to her (she was sacrificed). Well, the God sees that you have the legendary sword and says its possible to bring her back under one condition... You have to kill the colossi... And thus the adventure begins...Your character has his sword, a bow and a horse. You take the sword into a sunny area, press Circle and it'll deflect the light to where the next colossus is. You then just ride in that general direction searching to pinpoint where the next massive boss is. The world design is equally massive, and load times are very little. (You don't even notice them).One thing about the colossi... They are some of the biggest creatures I have EVER seen in a video game... The scale in the game makes it feel like a david and goliath fight to the extreme... Basically, you knock them down, or find a way to get on them, and then you latch on to their body hair (nothing beats falling from a giant rock monster's butt hairs XD) and you climb up their massive bodies. They have light points, usually on their head or chest and you have to draw your sword and stab them. Then you hang on for dear life as this 30 story beast trys to shake you off until you get a chance to stab it again.The game is fun, and it is beautiful... The colossi are so beautifully designed it feels like you're killing art, and you almost feel bad about it (until one drops a massive stone sword on your head x_x).About an hour and a half into it, I'd give it a 9.5 out of ten, because some of the controls are a little akward.The music is very beautiful too, especially when you kill a colossus... It makes you feel like you really accomplished something.I should also note its from the same development team at SCEA that made ICO (another rare and beautiful game for another thread )

I'm just curious... What exactly do you have to do? After looking at the site, I'm really confused... It looks like you're signing up to sell stuff online and post referral links.Not exactly my cup of tea, but to each their own.

Um, I'm going to assume you haven't seen Guitar Hero/Guitar Freaks...You're given a guitar shaped controller with 5 frets (in hero.. I forget about freaks) and you get a strum bar. Its not just about hitting the frets at the right time, its also about hitting the strum bar. Plus they have a whammy bar to bed the notes in real time as it plays with the song. So its not as... Well, if you can call DDR simple, its not as simple as that.

Its really a cool idea, but I'm constantly running photoshop, some audio production software, or some video compression software, so my system is drained as it is. Too bad, because google seems to be supporting a very good cause

I read that guitar hero is going to be released in the UK (with the controller )So you're in luck Alpha! No word on the price though (probably going to be around the equivilant of us$70, as that was our price)

I got my gmail with a random link at the bottom of googles web page... It said "try new gmail beta!" so I clicked on it and signed up :)I was like "there's probably like one in a million chance of that randomly cycling down there and I got it!"

I hate flash based websites... Some people still do have dialup... And some of us are on cell phones that don't support flash :)Its cool to have a flash cartoon, but not an entire site, making it inaccessable to the rest of us.Also, I hate it when people say "DON'T GOOGLE __________" because curiosity gets the best out of me every once in a while.... Ahmso, I'm talking to you (Pain4 was disgusting. And I heard about lemonparty, so I just stayed away)Other than that, I just hate trolls on forums. And ban happy admins

One distro I would like to point out is DamnSmallLinux. (Damnsmalllinux.org)Its a fairly newb friendly linux distro that fits onto a business card cd (<50mb).They have an icon on the desktop called MyDSL and its a list of all the apps that have been officially released. When you're connected to the internet, you just click the button and it downloads and installs .Also, when you bring up the directory that has the .dsl packages(if you saved them to a usb drive/cd/hard drive) in emelfm.bin (file manager), you select it, then click a button that says "MyDSL" and it automatically installs. Its really user friendly for linux, but you'll need to download some extra packages (all the libraries to run some of the files) before you dive headfirst. Their forums are _really_ helpful too.

Pharrell- how exactly did it break? There are dead pixel issues (as with all high-res lcd screens), but I have never heard of the psp just breaking.Game sharing only works for certain games, and I believe it says it on the box if you can. So it won't work with just any game out there.And getting online with it? Its as simple as running the network config settings. It takes about 3 mins.And GTA:LCS looks great on the psp screen... What about GTA for gameboy color?

I really love Rise Of Nations... The campaign mode was really cool and I loved going through the different ages. Age of Empires 1 was really good (I didn't like aoe2). And of course Command And Conquer... I grew up playing the first one. That game was so great back in 1995. "Reenforcements have arrived"

Hmm, I used the cache to download it yesterday... Anyways, I heard the main site should be back up any time now... Hopefully It rocks so much! Here's a working link http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Could a mod please merge these last two posts? Notice from serverph: merged

One of my friends linked me to this the other night... The site is down, but google cache still has it, and you can still download from the site... Buzz is a modular soft synth studio. It gives you hundreds of synths, sounds, drum kits, effects and filters, puts them at your fingertips and lets you play There's really no limit to what this thing can do.. I just found a vocoder on here All they synths and effects are completely modifyable... You can get some crazy sounds out of it... Its a little overwhelming at first, but if you follow the tutorial, you'll be making music in no time. Wow, I'm just so impressed by this... I was looking to spend $400 on a synth that didn't even do this much... Vocoder, hard drive recording, sampling.. Waveform editing.. It has it all Here's the link: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://www.buzzmachines.com/ (when it comes back up)

There are a few decent freeware ones.. Audacity comes to mind... As does Kreative Music Engine (I don't have links off hand, but google does )I've used kreative, it has a 16 track limit, and a 5 minute song length, and sounds ok... But my mic sucks and I have a built in sound card, so it could be better... They're worth looking up sometime to just try it out

Also, another point to mention is for the most part, psp games aren't region locked (there's only one, I think, that is). It makes importing really easy...I have Dynasty Warriors, Tokobot, GTA, Twisted Metal: Head On, Coded Arms, Burnout Legends and I imported Bokuno Watashino Katamari Damashii (best handheld game ever)...I love it and would pretty much recommned it to any gamer.

I recently imported Bokuno Watashino Katamari Damashii for the PSP from yesasia.com (from japan to america)I ordered it on the 18th of december, and they had a free shipping deal going on. The game was released on the 22nd and they said I would have it by the 30th. I paypaled them their money, and on the 23rd I got an email stating that the order had been delayed and would not ship until jan. 2. I thought, "well, I didn't really preorder it very early, and I had free shipping, so I can wait". On the 24th, however, I got a shipment invoice emailed to me (as was the original ship date). Well, I ended up getting the game jan 3rd. But I believe they sold my email address to spammers, because recently my email inbox has just been flooded with japanese and chinese spam.I'd beware ordering from them unless you're using gmail or something else with great spam guards.Also, their customer service is so-so... They only responded to one of my 4 emails I sent (all on different days, and the one they responded to was about payment)They may be cheaper, but I'd say you'll have better luck with lik-sang or play-asia.Also, the game was supposed to come packaged with a custom psp case (shipped with first set) but yesasia seperated them and is selling them seperately.

Sony added a web browser to the psp firmware with the 2.0 upgrade (they also blocked most homebrew programs), so the web browser is no longer a hack... If only they had bought the ngage technology...

Popolocrois looks pretty good, but it seems hard to track down. It might be worth checking out.

Actually it is a lot like guitar freaks... The big differences would be the notes drop towards you instead of straight down and the whammy bar for bending notes. The song selection is great (upwards of 35 songs, I believe, and they're not cut down like DDR songs, they include solos.)I've heard its the reason to own a ps2. And I'd agree with that. It rocks

To anyone who says "its just prettier, I'm gonna stick with ps2/xbox/gc"...Wait 6 months (at most) after the ps3 is released. You won't see any more ps2 games being made. All of the new games will be for ps3. Ps2 will be tossed in the bargin bin. And you'll be obselete and missing out on thousands of new games. Yes, I know this happens every gen, but you just have to embrace it.And m$oft will never touch sony in quality. They just own the multiplayer market

Anyone have/play Guitar Hero?If you haven't heard of it... It's made by Harmonix and Red Octane (Harmonix made Amplitude and Frequency for ps2, and Red Octane makes the overpriced foam ddr pads). Well, the game is played using a special guitar controller. It has 5 fret buttons and a strum bar and a whammy bar (the game sucks on a ps2 controller). Notes drop down the screen and when they hit the bar at the bottom, you fret the note (color coded) and hit the strum bar, pretty much like playing a real guitar. This is by far one of the most challenging music games I've ever played and its extremely fun...Anyone else play it?

I found out the lag may have been my program... I captured through windows movie maker and it had less than 1/4 a second lag. So its basically lag free through that

Patents apply to products. Copyrights are assigned to tangable works, such as a recording, a video, a program, a book. I believe you can copyright a product, but the patent is what is needed legally there.

You can't really say anything about their copy protection. They could spend millions on it and spend like 6 years, and any hacker with the right tools could crack it. Look at the psp, it's constantly being hacked. But still, if you don't support the corporations, people don't make money on making/selling games. Then, people will lose their jobs and nobody will make new games and the world will implode.Please don't steal games. They're not exactly easy or cheap to make.

I personally use DSL (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/) because I have no internet on my home pc, so I can only download stuff at the library onto my iPod. I didn't know ubuntu ships free cds, so I may check that out. The problem with DSL is it is _extremely_ minimalistic. It comes with xpaint, firefox, dillo, emelfm.bin for the filemanager, xcalc, siag, beaver, fluxbox and another window manager, and a few other apps/games. The plus side of it is DSL's iso is currently only 47mb. It is debian based, but you have to download a compiler for other distros. You also have to install a package for apt-get, and a few other basic linux tools. The other packages are only 1-10mb for those tools, though, and can be easily accessed through an icon on the desktop.I've found there's not a lot of extra support for external hardware (my wacom pen isn't supported, but the mouse works), but things like that are constantly being improved upon. Their forums are _extremely_ helpful as well. Also, openoffice. Abiword, xfree86, wine, audacity and quite a few other programs are easily installable.It's a very nice live cd, and its also a nice hd installed linux. And it's tiny and can run from your ram only... Definetly something worth checking out

I feel its kinda appropriate to post this now, since a hacking team found a way to dump some of the source from Condemned on the X360...Most game pirates piss me off. There's no nice way to say it. Anyone who is too cheap to buy a game or rent it until they beat it, which unless you rent an rpg or a massively long adventure game is one rental nowadays, should be shot.I don't have a problem with emulators of dead systems. Even if you do find SNES games used somewhere, Nintendo makes absolutely no money off of them. Even original gameboy and GBC is fine with me, as nintendo abandoned the systems and is abandoning the backwards compatability.But the things that really get me are people who use game launchers. They copy their ps2 and xbox games to their hard drives and run them from there. And PSP game piracy. The psp was a great device to play around with homebrew on. Sony _could_ have used that as a leverage point against the big N and could have possibly pulled it off. But then iso dumpers were made, and people started ripping games. I had somebody im me the other day telling me to downgrade my psp so he could send me iso files. I'm sorry, but I enjoy a working psp, GTA and Infected too much to risk bricking my psp.Another thing.. I was at pspupdates and they had a new firmware spoofer/loader. And one of the first comments was "does it load iso for games that require 2.xx?"Honestly, those people are the morons that caused sony to make firmwares in the first place.If you won't buy the games, don't buy the system. You only hurt everyone else who buys them. Corporations need our money to stay alive. No corporations=less new technology=no more gaming consoles to hack/rip/emulate.