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I'd suggest using Opera or Firefox (or both) to test your javascript, because they give less vague error messages in their error consoles. In this case opera tells me "message: Statement on line 10: Reference to undefined variable: getElementById", which means that there's no such thing as getElementById in scope. What you're looking for is document.getElementById, it's a method of the document object rather than a global function.

I agree it'd be great if somehow people who were underage couldn't get their hands on stuff they shouldn't, it'd reduce some of the criticism, encourage investment in more subtle games, and still allow for artistic expression, however... I can't think how that could realistically happen. For all the restrictions, not many teenagers have much trouble finding horror movies and porn, even alcohol and drugs are pretty easy to get. I think the guy that prompted the last round of complaints was over 18 anyway.

People see games as different to books and movies, not only because they aren't familiar with them, or because books and movies are more artistically mature forms, but also because there are significant differences that they can read issues into. Games aren't a stream of information from the text to us, we're part of a feedback loop. The rewards and punishments stemming from our actions seem to be mentally conditioning us to perform certain tasks, something a book can't do, and something that seems potentially dangerous to some.

Hopefully games will evolve towards respectability before they get cracked down on. So far it seems ok, politicians have been bringing this issue up since the 80s and nothing significant has been done, so we probably have plenty of time.

The sex issue is the funniest thing. Fahrenheit's sex scene was... not distasteful, but it's hilarious (move the controller up and down to commence humping) and pretty much superfluous (it's the optional reward for completing a guitar minigame...). It's unfortunate that it needed to be cut out for America, but the fact that that is up there with the best usage of sex in games is kind of sad.

Rui, equal doesn't mean identical, in this sense it generally means of equal worth. "No better. No worse. But certainly not equal." makes very little sense to me in that context. Equality for people all races doesn't mean making all races like caucasians any more than equality for men and women means sewing penises onto the girls. Various countries merging into one culture isn't particularly related to principles of equality.

Have you tried pressing tab? Apparently that hides the graphic, although people complain there's a delay, so I don't know how useful that is.

It's not at all the fact that he said the word "nigger" that has made the news, it's that he started shouting it at some black people in order to offend them along with making reference to lynching black people and generally crashing and burning on stage, which people will always love to watch. It's not the word, but the sentiment... if he came on and said "What's up my niggers!?" and it was a big talking point today I'd be very suprised, and for once people would be justified in their "omg, political correctness gone mad" rants.

My cousin finds it higly amusing to say nigger and he isn't racist, he's just a boring person that likes to be mildly shocking when he can.

The video was certainly odd, I'm not really sure what to make of it now... I doubt he's a particularly racist person, probably just a very silly one that won't back down when they've said something dumb in public.

If it sounds dodgy on the internet then it is. The idea that you can get items worth tens or hundreds of dollars by signing up to a few trials and referring a few people consistently makes no economic sense. I have spoken to people that have recieved ipods etc, but look at it, for every person that gets one there have to be hundreds that don't or it just doesn't work... if you can put in the effort to make 5 of your friends to sign up and refer 5 people, then you might get one, but that's actually quite hard and you'll be furthering what is essentially a pyramid scheme. It's not really any better than stealing one from a store, you're causing people trouble either way.

That didn't go very well.

My train was an hour late getting to London having to wait because of an accident in the severn tunnel, when I got to paddington I ran to the tube (not recommended if you are carrying a large backpack, but I saw no armed police), got to Victoria, ran to the coach station, our coach was still on the board but it was at gate 15, near the end of the building, so I went there and it was leaving just as I approached the gate. I contacted AGA but then I ran out of call credit trying to sort out some alternate transport.
I could take a train to Newcastle for £95, but I really couldn't afford it. So I went back to the coach station and tried to get on a later Newcastle coach, even if I'd arrive at 2am. Unfortunately they were all full so I decided to cut my losses and take the coach back to Wales, which was £19, and hilariously 1.5 hours late due to an accident on the M4.

I'll see if I can get any of the money back from the train company... but I'm more annoyed about not being able to get to Bonfirittens.

Argh, nobody in my family will drive me to cardiff so I can't get the bus.

The train to london is £50, it's a 2 hours journey, wtf! But I guess paying it is better than not going... I should get to london on time to meet Berian, if nothing else goes wrong.

This time tomorrow I'll be two hours into my epic journey to Sunderland I'm trying to find all my winter clothes at the moment... it has been pretty cold at night recently.

Nothing much happened in the past 4 years, I went to some AGS meets, and I've done 6 weeks of university studying game design, I might do lots more weeks in future.

I've never had a girlfriend but I always knew how to pronounce paella, so that's ok.

It's a long way to go, especially if you do it budget like AGA and I, but... it'll be fun.

LF, what is it this time? We can get around it! Last time we didn't even attempt a raid on the passport office. We can always find a way!

No, for various reasons but fundementally the code in an executable is machine code and AGS linux engine is compiled for PC x86 processors and the dreamcast/ds/psp etc have different types of processors. So unless we could compile a build for these other systems then they wouldn't run, linux or not. The problem with simply compiling a version for a console, besides AGS's source not being available, is that the hardware differs so much, and the libraries AGS uses are not available for that hardware.

A DS port would be a lot of work... I think it's possible, but I'm not too interested in doing it because like ScummVM on DS it'd be merely a curiosity. All I've done is loaded up Indy 4 and gone "oh, indy on my ds... wow..." and turned it off after the intro. PC games are generally not worth playing on handhelds in my opinion.

I don't think the voting system is better or worse than the last one. Personally I'd rather put in one vote saying which I think it the best background, the category systems seem to suggest I can't make up my own mind when it comes to what priorities I place on a good adventure game background, and actually artificially place some things I'd consider less important in most backgrounds on an equal footing with fundementals like ideas and mood. It's quite possible I'd give most of my votes to one background and still consider another one the best.

One thing that's good about the many categories is that it tends to ensure most entries get a vote for something that they did well, but I can give an honourable mention in words if I think another background is especially deserving in some aspect.

Well done Idlu, nice background.

PC games vary a lot in what price point they release at, it's not standard like console games. But 30 GBP is a typical store price. That's less than $60 which isn't so awful I guess. Console games are the worst for regional differences, presumably because of region coding restrictions... current gen stuff is released at the equivalent of about 90 USD compared to 50-60 in US stores.

Buying games in store is not a good idea, at least here online retailers are usually at £5 cheaper and do free shipping.

As a proportion of wealth we're probably not as bad off as some countries, but for a student like me it doesn't matter what the average wage is, I usually either pirate or I don't play. There are usually better or important things you can get for £40 than a console game.

Oblivion is £20 now in the store I looked at, probably a rerelease.

If you consider Asia and Europe as different continents in the traditional way then the lines are drawn so the middle east including Israel is part of Asia, so Africa and Asia join at the Egyptian border. Geographers tend to think about it as one Eurasian continent, though.

Personally I look forward to Japan's admission to Eurovision.

While the gameplay is generally extremely repetitive and linear to the point of feeling on rails at time (the linear part is the real shame because some Hitman type freedom of approach would do wonders for the series) I still enjoy it. All the games have a very coherent presentation and obviously high production values. Slinking around in the shadows just looks great and feels right. Especially Chaos Theory looked hot on the xbox, effective shader usage. I may pick up SC for the Wii at some point in the future, but it won't be one of the first games I get.

Enough with the idiocy please... if people want to talk about WoW Collector Editions or something, fine, but all the baseless insults are getting painful.

They gave an otherwise unqualified tester a design position? I thought that was just a myth to encourage people work for £3 an hour...

I have no stories about being exploited by the industry, kind of hope I'll never have to be part of it, but the forumites that work in it seem to enjoy it.

If you're not going to do any heavy xml editing on a regular basis you should probably just edit the file in notepad, or your favorite text editor. There are specialised XML editors that will syntax highlight and check for well formedness, but you don't particularly need one for this task.

I have an athlon XP 2600+ and 512mb ram... I'm fine with it, rarely is there much of a memory shortage... but I wouldn't mind another 512.
If your cpu is running at 100% usage when you aren't doing something extremely processor intensive you should check what is using the CPU on the processes list, because that's quite unusual and suggests there's a software problem.

I'm reluctant to upgrade one part of my pc really, because technology has moved on so much I'd have to throw out any bits I bought if I upgraded to a new system later. RAM has gotten faster, graphics cards come as PCI-E now, all the processors have new slots... I'm going to wait until I can make a new system entirely.