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This isn't a very interesting opinion, but... I say Brosnon is the best Bond, but he's unfortunatly been often wasted in what are basically fun, but generic modern action movies.

Having said that, I do think that for pure entertainment value Golden Eye and Tommorow Never Dies are close to the top of the Bond heap. TWINE was a godawful mess, though. Haven't seen DAD yet.

And I'm pissed off that this Tarantino/Brosnon/Casino Royale thing isn't going to happen, given that the Bond producers appear to be the only people on this planet of ours that don't think it's a great idea.

Best Bond song? You Only Live Twice, of course!

Man, I LOVE this guy, and have huge amounts of respect for him both as an artist and a human being. I'm glad so many here like him!

How many other musicians can legitimately say they only got better and better as they got older? But for him, that's exactly the case - his run of albums from Swordfishtrombones to the present is one of the most consistently excellent I've ever heard.

Swordfish, Bone Machine, Black Rider are a few of my personal favourates by him. Alice would be my desert island pick though - that album is just insanely beautiful. I can't wait for his new one.

Yeah, this is excellent - thanks for linking to it. I never expected the story to actually be involving, but it is indeed. And the characters are great! I can't get enough of those happy puzzle blocks.

Plus... it's HUGE!

Ah, okay. Thanks for the info, though!

I was just wondering: does anyone know know any statistics that show the overall sales of specific adventure games (I'm mainly thinking Lucasarts, Searra etc) over the years?

It's common knowledge when the commercial peaks and declines of the genre were, generally speaking, but I'd love to see some hard stats just to see exactly what the trends were, and to get an impression of the relative popularity of individual games.

I'd also be interested in exactly how much these games actually cost to produce, but that's maybe asking a little much.

So, does anyone have any info?

Your summary did contradict most of what you said because you either have not read any Asimov or were day dreaming while you did.

I haven't read any Asimov, and never claimed to have read him - and I've never pretended the film has anything to with the guy's works. I think in the interests of honesty they should have used a different name, given that they never had any intention of truly adapting the book. But having a stupid or inappropriate name is only a superficial flaw.

That was a pretty nice thing to do. I hope people will be throwing money at me if/when I get my game finished...

Though given that my game is about a leper community, that's probably fairly unlikely.

Fuck you!


...oh.

You know, funnily enough i've got a an old VHS of Dune sat on bookshelf a mere two meters away from me - I'm almost tempted to give it another shot. I seem to remember those sandworms being pretty cool, at least.

I never said anything about the Dune movie (which admittedly did strike me as pretty wretched last time I gave it a go), I was talking about Dune spin-off novels, written by hack authors after Herbert's death.

Granted, I haven't read *any* Dune novels, so for all I know the spin-offs could be timeless masterpieces that leave the originals in the lurch, but still, the idea of faceless authors being hired to officially 'continue the legacy', or whatever, bothers me far more then any duff film adaption. Everyone knows that films are films and books are books, but such new 'official' books are making a far greater claim to authenticity then any film, and so are far more likely to piss on the artist's grave and/or to rape his corpse.

Also: my I, Robot summary didn't contradict anything - I stand by my opinion that as a stand alone movie it's generally solid, marred by a number of unfortunate, but largely superficial (as opposed to fundamental) flaws that emerged primarily due to commercial considerations. In fact, as idiotic metaphors go, I don't think mine was all that bad.

And christ, I do like the fact there are many smart, opinionated people on these boards, but dropping the general level of hostility a little really wouldn't hurt anyone.

That's what drives me crazy! It bothers me that what I consider to be a perfectly solid piece of entertainment was widely hated before its release by throngs of people who hadn't actually seen it (and in many cases hadn't even read the books), all for a bunch of outside reasons that have little to do with how good or well made it actually is. In fact, a lot of it seemed to be in reaction to the early trailers, rather then the actual film itself.

I agree that the whole name thing was fairly obnoxious behaviour, but like I said before, worse artistic crimes have probably been commited by films that used a full "based on the novel by..." credit. And at least they were honest enough not to even pretend to be doing any kind of straight adaption (in fact, I'd be interested to know which of the two script-writing oscar catagories are made elligable in ambiguous situations like this).

In my book, this whole thing is far less of a "pissing on the original artists grave" situation then those endless post-Herbert Dune spin-off novels, for example. Or even calling that Coppola film "Bram Stoker's Dracula", for that matter.

In summary: I sort of see the I, Robot movie as a beautiful woman, sadly marred by some unsightly facial scarring. And her wounds were inflicted by the probing diamond-sharp talons of the Hollywood CAPITALIST MACHINE!!!

It's maybe a bit late to be upping this, but I have to say I was VERY impressed by this film.

Aside from a few disappointing flaws (some flat characters, the undeniably shameful product placement, Smith's occasional distracting lapses into Fresh Princedom and other occasional bits of mainstream genericism), it's almost everything I could want from a big-budget, high-concept action blockbuster. It's just a solid, beautifully crafted, well told sci-fi thriller, with about ten times the intrigue and intelligence of any recent blockbuster I can think of. Admittedly, it sometimes stuck me as a little *too* much of an A.I. / Minority Report hybrid, but I'm not terribly bothered as this kicks both of those films into next week, as far as I’m concerned.

Really, when we live in an age where over-hyped generic letdowns like Spiderman and Pirates of the Caribbean (both of which were only remotely memorable due a few standout performances) can get widely hailed as classics, it annoys me that a mainstream film as good as this can get so relentlessly shat on by so many people.

Speaking of which, I’ve was poking around the imdb boards a bit over the last couple of days, and can safely say hard-core Asimov fans are barely more rational and intelligent then the Metallica fans that hang around on the Some Kind Of Monster board - and Metallica fans have stupid minds. STUPID! STUPID! (aside from me, naturally).

Anyway, as this thread got a bit sidetracked by the (actually quite interesting) product placement discussion, I was just wondering whether anyone else has any thoughts on this film?

I don't think it's just a case of the game doing a good job of emulating the old fashioned graphical style. You could hire the greatest artists on earth to redo the graphics for that game, but if they had any sense it wouldn't end up looking dramatically different, because that clean, no-nonsense artistic style is a large part of what makes PB distinctive and unique.

While the guy who made it probably isn't any kind of artistic genius, I think he deserves better then the mildly dismissive "he did the best he could, given how much he had on his plate" kind of remarks. I honestly don't see the graphics in that game as any kind of failure or underachievement. That's why it rubs me the wrong way a little when people say you should try to "look past" the graphics, when instead they should really be encouraging you to try to adjust to the unusual style.

I'm not *condemning* people who think the graphics are simplistic or amaturish, I just think they should try to look at them a little differently.

I haven't played Larry Vales, but I think the graphics in Pleurghburg are stylish and cool. I honestly wouldn't change them for anything.

Man, I really sympathise with QuantumRich - I just went through something similar after a lightning strike seemingly screwed my hard drive. I thought I'd lost my game in progress, but much more importantly, I thought I'd lost two years worth of my music stuff that was irreplacable and extremely important to me. Luckily today I found out my hard drive has been completely fixed, so I'm pretty happy, and I've learned a valuable lesson to boot - back up EVERYTHING that is even remotely important to you, right now.

Ali G was depressingly huge here in the UK a few years back, though the mania seems to be pretty much over now.

The thing is, the character had already pretty much worn out it's potential by the time he got his own series (it started out as short five min segments which were the highlights of a truely miserable program called the 11 O'Clock show). Originally the focus was almost entirely on the interviews, and it really worked pretty well for a while.

Once he became a household name the whole politician interview thing inevitably lost it's edge, and the whole thing just got more and more tired, stupid and lame, and morons around the country kept on spitting out the catchphrases for so long that after a while I just wanted to snap the collective neck of the entire British population.

And I have to say it's a little depressing to me that Ali G is fairly well known around the world now, whereas practically no-one outside the UK ever gets the opportunity to see The Day Today, Brass Eye, I'm Alan Partridge and other phenomenal UK comedy shows. But I suppose the moderate worldwide success of the Office was a pretty positive thing, though I can't say I'm in love with it.

I really love certain kinds of jazz, but I'm such an ignorent pleb when it comes to the genre that I just end up stumbling about from random artist to random artist, not knowing where I should be looking.

I hate to say it, given the guy's one of the great sacred cows of music, but I really don't enjoy Miles Davis much at all. I've heard two of his best loved albums (Bitches Brew and... Kind Of Blue, I think it was) but for the most part I find them pretty dull and frankly quite ugly a lot of the time. Even worse: I actually find Davis's playing one of the least appealing aspects of his music - the backing bands (and especially guitarist John Mclaughlin) are often doing some cool stuff, but he insists on messing everything up with his infernal tootling.

Chick Corea seems much closer to what I'm looking for - mellow, groovy and melodic. The one of his I heard sounded a little like Can's Future Days album, and if there's one thing on this earth I love it's Can's Future Days album.

Damnit, I hate being a jazz pleb.

Blackthorne: I don't think anyone here expects (or even wants) to see an AvP film that tries to be a thoughtful, intelligent work of art - most just want it to be trashy entertainment. But there are still degrees of trash - Robocop, The Thing, Total Recall, Predator and even Alien(s) to an extent are all basically ultraviolent trashy entertainment at heart, but they're beautifully crafted, extremely effective and intelligently handled trashy entertainment.

The reason people are worried about AvP is because there's no reason to assume Paul Anderson is capable of creating anything close to the quality of those films above, and combined with the PG-13 rating, there's plenty of reason to worry that we're going to end up with an ineptly handled, sanitized piece of crap.

I've never been in one, but I NEED to start a band sooner or later. If I don't I'll eventually go crazy.

If I ever form it, my band's gonna have a violin and cello doubling the lead guitar and bass respectively, with stacks of complex intertwining lines. The music'll be some sort of ultra-melodic, groove-based acid rock/electronica hybrid with occasional touches of jazz and classical, with tons of shifting dynamics, quiet/loud bits, builds and climaxes etc.

Man... we'll be the worst band of all time! I still really want to do it, though...

Hello darlings! Apologies if this is too 'techy' a question for this particular forum, but I wasn't sure where else to put it.

See, I recently found an old Mac copy of Day Of The Tentacle left over from the Mac-using days of my youth, and I want to play it. I want to play it BAD. Luckily I found a lovely thread on this very subject giving detailed instructions on how to run DOTT in ScummVM.

Now, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the way I'm following their instructions, as I've managed to convert Mac demos of Sam & Max and Full Throttle and have them running perfectly on my PC through Scummvm, but for DOTT nothing seems to work.

Here is my problem: when I use the 'rescumm'Ã,  tool to convert the DOTT Data file it unpacks 52 .lfl files, but when it tries to extract the 'monster.sou' file I get a message saying "ERROR: Could not allocate 268965339 of memory.!" (if this's refering to hard drive space, I should have more then enough). It extracts enough for ScummVM to recognise the original Maniac Mansion (listed as a seperate game), but nothing else.

Apologies again if this is in the wrong place, but I posted a similar message on the ScummVM forums a few weeks ago and haven't had a reply, and this is the only other place I could think of where someone might be able to help.

I'd REALLY appreciate any ideas, if anyone has any experience with this kind of thing. Thanks!

I love the concept of these X VS X things - they're like something a bunch of 13 year old nerds would think up, and that's a beautiful thing. This one could make for the greatest B-Movie of all time. Plus, it's got Lance Henrikson in it, and you can't beat a bit of Lance Henrikson action in an Alien film.

But... writer/director Paul Andrerson does NOT have a reputation as a talented guy, and the US PG-13 rating suggests there wont be much gore. For a film like this, having little gore seems to be missing the point a little.

It could still be good fun, though. And if it's a hit, maybe that Ridley Scott/James Cameron Alien 5 collaboration might have a better shot of happening.