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However, do note that this applies to American ISPs, and that other countries may well keep the entire 'net open. In which case, well, sucks to be you.

That's a very short-sighted way of looking at things. Let's face it -- anything the Americans do will eventually find its way to Europe. (Except Twinkies. They never made it). If Eircom looks across the pond and sees just how much more money AT&T is suddenly making, you know they'll do the exact same thing.

However, like someone said earlier (evenwolf?): all it would take is one independent Internet Service Provider to break the system. At least in Ireland, it's law that any changes to the constitution must be voted upon by the public, so the chances of our government passing a ban against 'free internet' is slim...

I find it hard to believe that anyone cares about any of these answers... It always strikes me as a cheap way to get noticed. Few people can resist the urge to list their opinions on a form if they believe someone will read it -- usually it wont be. Even if they didn't make up that vague report, who's going to sit there and read pages and pages of basically the same thing ("I like making games and I'm not sexist")?
In fact, most surveys are done for the sole purpose of being able to say "we did a survey," for whatever reason. They're never particularly reliable -- especially when posted up in front of everyone. After seeing that every other person in the community thinks a certain way, who's going to be honest about their feelings?

How exactly does voting work? Is it up to the public, or the entrants, or some 'judges', or what?

I have a feeling there aren't many people with the patience and devotion to read every single entry, weigh their merits as a piece of creative writing and make a perfectly unbiased judgment.

Not mention that if the whole point of a 350 word limit is to encourage people to cut away the excess rhetoric we use and leave a glittering gem, having the public decide seems like an odd juxtaposition. The public are idiots -- the Da Vinci Code was one of the top-selling books of all time for chrissake...

The most freaked out I've ever been in a game was when I got 'Constantine' second-hand. The game itself isn't that scary (it's a 'jump-out-at-you-and-swipe-off-a-few-hit-points-and-then-get-nailed-to-the-wall' kind of game*), but the disc was heavily damaged and therefore the game was riddled with all these weird glitches. The audio was all screwed up, enemies would turn invisible, etc.


* I laughed the whole way through Doom 3. For one thing, the 'pop-out-and-scare-you' thing was so overdone, that if you saw a dark area, it was pretty much guaranteed to have an imp lurking in there. And unless you were playing on 'hard', none of the enemies were particularly threatening -- they pop out, go "graaagh!" and then hit you for 5 damage, to which you retaliate with a shotgun blast to the face. It just didn't strike me as particularly scary.


Bioshock is mentionable (I don't think anyones mentioned it yet). It's not particularly scary - more creepy - but it has its moments (such as that room where the lights go off, and suddenly all the corpses come alive -- I nearly wet myself, 'cause the whole time you get so used to looting the random corpses lying around; or the part where the statues follow you around)

Crayons transport me back instantly to my childhood, I use them whenever I can.

Ahh, the memories. Although I don't remember ever using a crayon to draw with...
My experiences are more of the "Jews versus Nazis Crayon War Classroom Extravaganza" variety.

We were so politically incorrect back then...

I have been told that I have overexaggerated the hotness of this chick...

I think she's cute. Then again, people always say I have weird taste in woman. I tend to find 'cute' far more attractive than 'supermodel gorgeous'.

[Emerald Raption]

Mine's Emerald Raption, and I'm currently playing around with GTA4.

My gamerscore is about 8,500, and my penis is around 8 inches. Oh yeah, and I like toast -- but with honey, not butter.

Hmm, I have a feeling that this guy isn't entirely serious. If you read this stuff carefully, you can see a lot of thought put in to it. I can't tell if it is trying to be funny, or to impress, but i have a feeling his assholery is at least somewhat intentional. (In other words, I don't think he's as oblivious as he comes across)

Although, maybe that's just me. I tend to give people credit for things they don't deserve (like Paris Hilton -- I have a feeling she's a lot smarter than she portends)

^^^ That's exactly what I didn't like. I'm all for realism in games, but Grand Theft Auto is one game that is supposed to be as fun as possible, not as realistic as possible.

Niko is a one-man-army who never dies no matter how many times he blows up, and is completely forgotten about the minute he leaves the cop's sight, no matter how many thousands of innocent citizens he kills. Speaking of which, his personality is completely inconsistent -- one minute he's massacring a warehouse full of men for no reason other than some guy he met for the first time told him to (shouting "I'LL RIP YOUR FUCKING HEART OUT!" as he does) for a couple hundred bucks, the next minute he's comforting some girl he just met as she cries on his shoulder.

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The missions themselves are ridiculous: "Hey, let's like, rob the city's main bank without any sort of getaway plan or exit route"
"Look, I don't trust you enough for you to go on a real mission, so instead I want you to take this sniper rifle and cover me while I stand around like a suicidial idiot...", etc.

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GTA is not, and will never be 'realistic'. The only difference is, GTA4 is slightly more realistic than SA, but not by much. The only major improvment would be Niko over CJ. The things I miss are:

- Proper Car Storage (like the system from Saints Row, where you don't have to drive back to your storage every single time)
- Car modification (out of place or not, it's just not as fun without it)
- Cooler weapons (what happened to the flame thrower, minigun, katana, C4, etc. -- not to mention dual-wielding shotguns)
- Haircuts/tattoos/jewelry (it just made things less interesting for me. I mean, why even list 'shops' as a separate category if all you can buy is clothes?)
- Stats (I personally liked the stats, and how your character evolves depending on your play-style -- you over-eat, and you get fat. That was awesome. It sucks that Niko is permanently pot-bellied)
- Parachutes/sky-diving
- Gang wars/Territories (I was disappointed you couldn't say, earn territory for the McReary's from the mafia)
- Vehicle-based missions (pimping, fire-fighting, paramedic, etc.)
- Rewards for missions (50% more armour, immunity to fire, 50% more health, all taxis had nitro -- that was cool)
- Tanks, bicycles, hovercrafts (I don't even understand why they weren't included)
- More interesting characters (everyone in GTA4 seems to be the same -- either a low-life drug addict who you 'help out', or a big-time imperialist Toreno-clone. What happened to Woozie and Big Smoke and The Truth and classic characters like that?)
- More interesting/varied missions (it seems like every single mission in GTA4 was either a car chase or a shoot-out. Or both.)


Sacrificing those things for a story that really wasn't that much better than San Andreas seems wrong. This, to me, was the first GTA which was less fun than the previous one -- they actually removed good stuff rather than added stuff in...

[and helping the Irish mob takes up about a third of the story missions]

Maybe so, but there's nothing more irritating to an Irishman than people who pretend to be Irish.

We're a very proud people, as many Europeans are. We're all self-conscious about globalisation and becoming 'Little America', and we love the stereotypical view that we're silver-tongued, party-loving devils who can hold our liquor and are always up for a laugh. It's a sense of national pride that's so palpable even companies like 'Carlsberg' pick up on it.
And when Americans start calling themselves Irish because their "great great great grandma took a piss in Dublin on the way over from Leeds" it's like they're stealing our personal identity because they think it's cooler than being just a 'normal' American.

So it's incredibly annoying when this American gobshite is there shouting "Crickey, boyos! I haven't seen this much combat since Belfast!"

I mean, if they were actually taking the piss, it'd be grand, but the fact that they're actually trying -- and helping the Irish mob takes up about a third of the story missions, more than any other ethnicity -- without a single bit of research into what Irish people are actually like, is just retarded... (not to mention that they seemed to get almost every other ethnicity right, without portraying them solely as a pack of dysfunctional drug addicts)

You could play games!
Like Half Life 2, Unreal 3, Crysis, Oblivion and all those other firework show cases. I'm not really into those games, but maybe that's because I lack that monster pc.

Hmm, thing is, most of those I was interested in I got for the 360, and I seem to have trained myself to remain apathetic to everything that doesn't fit a certain criteria (3rd person action with an intensive story)... so the majority of great games that I've missed out on just don't spark anything in me. Maybe I should just get 'em anyway...

I think he's brilliant.

As visions of sobbing, tormented forum denizens filled my mind's eye, their will to live withered by my relentless application of flawless logic and piercing critical thinking skills, I was forced to remember the immense price of victory I’ve paid before...

... two or three hours per day of time spent slaughtering every post made by every single scumbag leading them to commit themselves to surrender, suicide or an asylum.

He reminds me of me, only more committed to the whole 'narcissistic prick' vibe...

Now that's hardly fair...

Porn. Lots and lots of porn. @$$loads of porn. As much porn as your HDD can possibly hold.

With a terrabyte hard-drive, plus another 320 GBs on an external one that I had beforehand, I don't think there's enough hours of the day. Plus, my general distaste for other men's penises eliminates a lot of the stuff out there...

Build it yourself.

It prolongs that feeling of wanting a really awesome computer, and it's very enjoyable.

I think you've missed the point.
Anyway, I was thinking about doing that -- I even had all the components picked out -- but then I realised "shit, with my luck with computers, there's no way I'll be able to build this thing without blowing it up or getting electrocuted..."
Hell, I nearly electrocuted myself just trying to plug it in. And I did cut myself with a switch-blade... I also was seconds from removing a panel clearly labelled "Do Not Remove" before my friend pointed it out. And believe me, that was the smoothest setting up of an electronic device I've ever done...



P.S. On the 'birthday list', how come it seems to think I'm turning thirty? I don't remember ever disclosing my age...

Well, as you may or may not have noticed, it's my birthday on the 17th, so I decided to get a top-of-the-range computer (for once -- usually I go for the second-cheapest option). It's a bloody mammoth of a thing, with a Quad Core Processor, 4GB of Ram, and a GeForce 8600 series graphics card, together with a 22" flat-screen monitor.

Now, after several hours of wrestling to get it to work, I'm left facing the ultimate question: what the hell do I do with it?

It seemed like, as I lay around dreaming of a computer like this, there were hundreds of things I was missing out on, but now I'm just blanking (hell, all I've done so far is browse AGS, and it's not like I needed this 50-pound, thousand-euro demon just to do that...)


So, any ideas?

Pfft, since when did everyone become so sensitive about this crap?

I tend to take a "flirt with them until someone tells you not to" kind of attitude, and it works out pretty well. You just have to have a sense of when people are getting upset, and when they don't care. Maybe it's just me, but you can see it in their eyes when someone's uncomfortable...

Finally got this game. Personally, I think it's a bit of a step down from San Andreas in most regards, except perhaps in the atmosphere.

The thing that really pissed me off though was that they got authentic Eastern European actors, Russian actors, Jamaican actors, African American actors, Italian American actors, American American actors -- they even got Ricky Gervais -- but they couldn't get a single focking Irish guy! All they had were these New Yorker guys who threw in the occasional perversion of Irish slang, and made vague references to the Troubles. I mean, WTF?

This is almost as bad as when Atlas turned out to not even exist. Why are Irish characters always disappointing?

Singapore, where else? The homeland of banana people: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Check with your friendly local travel agent for details!

Wow, I always thought my Korean friend made that up herself...

I loved this film. It was fucking hilarious! I saw it with my friends a while ago, and we were laughing the whole way through. The bilesome dialogue, the gratuitous, unnecessarily gruesome violence, the excruciating cliches (like how

Spoiler

the asshole who bullies the main character dies the most painfully, or how the government nukes them all in the end

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)

Sounds like Tom & Jerry.