People need to let this go. It's funny, but there's no reason to hate the girl, any more than any other spoiled brat celebrity. All she wants is what ever other teenager wants, and that is to be a rock star. She fucked up, paniked, and blamed her band, but compared to other famous people (nba players, for example), it's a pretty mild offense.

What if we hate all spoiled brat celebrities?  Is it okay to make fun of her because she's now made herself an easy target?

Ugh.  Look at the known issues list; I don't feel like starting over because I installed a patch that they refused to provide a 'rollback' patch for and now savegames are borked.  Not  to mention setting my quality lower because I'm using Cat 4.9 drivers.   Or checking CapsLock before I start the game.  If you're going to disappear for months to 'fix' a patch, at least show up at the door with something that's quality.  They released a great game, but they need to work on support quite a bit.

After that dance of hers its a wonder it did'nt rain in the studio.

Really?  I thought it was 'I need more cowbell!' in interpretive dance form.

What if you don't have the internet?  How do you register/play HL2?  Are they going to have a 800 number to call ala Microsoft?

You don't.  I expect 'working Internet connection' will be in the requirements on the box.  It'll probably piss a lot of people off, but that's the risk they run.

It'll be 'gotten around' within the first day, if not sooner, methinks.

But surely any method to 'get around' this kind of thing would require an Internet connection to find.

Ah, looks like a firewall issue.  Could someone be so kind as to go to http://patch.station.sony.com:7000/patch/launchpad/Install_LaunchPad.exe and download that, then email it to me?

Edit: Never mind, proxies are fun.

Edit edit:  Blast!  Still doesn't work.

I got in, but I can't get to the Sony Launchpad installer.  Anyone here who can email me the file so I can start downloading?

What if you don't have the internet?  How do you register/play HL2?  Are they going to have a 800 number to call ala Microsoft?

You don't.  I expect 'working Internet connection' will be in the requirements on the box.  It'll probably piss a lot of people off, but that's the risk they run.

I hope it's not moved up too far.  I just got into the beta.

I also hope I can get to it from behind my firewall, of course.  Not looking promising, since I can't launch the Sony LaunchPad, and there's no response from their webserver.  If WoW is the only thing I can actually play (stress test worked fine behind my firewall), then it wins by default.

Boy, talk about no class.  Walking offstage and leaving the band to finish the set, and THEN accusing them of being the screwups.

Also, it's gall, not gaul.  Been playing a little too much Rome: Total War lately?   :wink:

No offense, but if you're looking for the kind of depth and complexity that requires an extensive printed manual, BF1942 probably isn't going to be your cup of tea.  I never cracked the manual once in all my time playing.

As for the add-ons, you really, REALLY don't need a manual for those.  They're basically packs of additional maps and weapons; I don't think they added any notable features.  And there are plenty of maps and weapon lists online to look at if you want info on them, some on sites that would put a printed manual to shame.  It would be like having a printed manual for the UT2K4 Community Bonus Pack.

So what do you guys think happened to the WMD?

If you have more choices to pick from than these, post them;

1. WMD moved prior to the invasion/war.
2. WMD programs dismantled and nonexistant prior to the invasion/war.
3. NO WMD prior to the invasion/war.
4. WMD's buried in the sand, underground, not yet found, never will be found.

WMDs mostly dismantled, lost, or sold to other factions, but all of that occurring years and years ago.  I think there's a continuing threat from the mere existence of those weapons, but I don't think Saddam, at least at the time of the invasion, posed any additional threat, and wasn't manufacturing any more at the moment (even if he wanted to).  I also think the invasion itself, and the anarchy that followed, resulted in a massive increase to the threat to the US, as any stockpiles and materiel that did exist for WMDs was distributed to parties unknown.  We needed more men on the ground, more oversight, and better planning, especially since we made WMDs such a huge part of the case to invade.

Something just hit me, if my internet were to go down or if for whatever reason i'm without access to steam online, is there a way to make some backups?
I was recently without internet for several months recently for a couple different reason and if that were to happen again, am i screwed?

You can copy the .gcf files to a CD or DVD for backup, though I'm not sure if you can reactivate those without an internet connection.  But as long as you have the single-player games installed and registered once, you can play them just the same.

Iraq did have WMD. This is an incontrovertible fact.

That's not the issue.  We know they did have WMD in the past.  The dispute is whether they had WMD, or the faciilities to produce WMD, in terror-effective quantities at the time of our build-up to invasion.  That looks ever more doubtful.

Some of my braincells have now been allocated to storing the memory of that for the entire rest of my life. I'm not sure how I feel about that  :shock:

Never before have my feelings been so adequately described by another.  Bravo, Gryndyl.  Bravo.

Grr... university firewall still blocks DoW ports.  One of these days, when I'm back home, I'll give you guys a good game.

This just in: Majority of Bush supporters and brain-washed morons.

This is the kind of thing that will lose us R&P priveleges.  Edit that, please, and keep it off the forum in the future.

Edit for tone:  I'm not a mod, so I don't really have any authority or standing to ask, but I don't want one to duck in here, see that, report it to staff, and result in us losing R&P priveleges.  All it takes is one of us to ruin it for everyone.

Road to gold has been the traditional home of game threads, gold or not, for stuff not on shelves yet.

Until the all-important second page of the Impressions thread, anyway.

Announcement of another batch on Saturday, so they say.

This means I'd have to plug it in just to install the game and play by myself, that's lame.

You only need it once, when you install.  To play by yourself, you can be offline, as long as you've registered.  I know extra wires are clutter, but if it's only a one-time thing, I wouldn't mind.

Waiting for Christmas for reviews, patches, mods, and the like.  Halo 2 is my first priority, though, and Half-Life 2 I get through the ATI voucher, so I'll have plenty to do until then.

Not to mention my backlog!  WH40K, Rome:TW, Sims 2, Beyond Good and Evil, TOEE, MetaBall for UT2004 (great time waster), and the increasingly frequent in-dorm games of Dungeon Siege and system-linked Halo.

It was just announced that the copy protection for ALL copies of HL2, including store-bought, will be through Steam.  Buy it, activate it once through Steam, and then it can be played offline in single-player or LAN mode.

So I guess all you people who hate Steam are out of luck.  It's a shame, because I don't see much wrong with Steam, personally, and it will hopefully do a decent job at eliminating more piracy than CD copy protection (which we know from experience doesn't work).

Eh.  About to go out to Long Island for dinner with the girlfriend's family, after which I'm buckling down and working on my work for next week (a midterm, speech, and paper all due on Wednesday).

I seem to recall a news article that said network times were slowly drifting off by a minute or two; the networks were claiming it was for those vital 'on-the-hour' viewers who flip through if there's a commercial, but PVR companies were claiming it was to force people to sit and watch instead of recording.

If you're interested in Half-Life 2 at all, just wait and get the Silver package off of Steam; it includes Valve's back catalog, including Half-Life (and the Source remix when it comes out).

Wow... you guys made me dig up a copy of Ultima 4 that runs on my PDA.  I'm never even going to get any work done OUTSIDE of the room now.

"Expect the expected."  --Discworld

I think it's the fact that the Source engine has a bigger name so it will be getting the majority of the next cool mods.  Does the Crytek engine support multiplayer?  I've only played the game a little on a friend's computer (mine won't do it justice) and I was very impressed by the atmosphere of the game and the visuals are just plain awesome.  I'd love to have a multiplayer game on one of those islands.

Far Cry's multiplayer is pretty standard.  It's as generic as SOF2's, but without the great feel that kept me going back to SOF2 multiplayer for quite a while.  A few more distinctive weapons would keep it a lot more interesting.  Of course, it doesn't help that they released a 1.3 patch to fix quite a few bugs, and only THEN discovered it FUBARed the game with an astonishing amount of configurations, THEN declined to issue a rollback patch.  I got to the uninstalling the entire game part, then decided to reinstall when it's worth it.

Guess what?  It hasn't been, yet.

I wouldn't know... I was pissed off enough about the 1.3 patch thing that I haven't reinstalled since.

Vazquez in. Brown out.

Is this a good thing or not?

No.  Grand slam.

And I guarantee you he's not buying his own beer for a long, long time.

KeySJU

You can download episodes through bittorrent.

Not behind my firewall I can't.  No BT, Kazaa, EMule, or anything of the sort.  Gotta love universities.

Let it go, man.  Let it go.  A GG raised from the dead now would probably be a zombie GG, anyway.  And we don't need release sites wandering around the Internet eating people's brains.  That's just not cool.

In conclusion, zombies suck.

Is there any way to catch up on Lost?  I missed out in the beginning, and now I want to catch up, but I don't want to start watching in the middle.

Are they running an encore anytime soon, or is it better to just wait for the DVDs?

Last year, in Game 7, there was a small riot in the quad; police were called, and many things were broken.  Hell hath no fury like exuberant Yankees fans.

This year, I have a room with a great spectating view.  So, in a twisted way, I'd really like to see the Sox take it in extra innings, just to see what happens.  I bet nobody in campus security has the night off tonight.

On the new RvB site, they have links across the top; one of those is to their new series, [url http://strangerhood.com/home.php] The Strangerhood[/url].  As for the RvB episodes, they keep a rolling archive to save bandwidth; the best way to catch every episode in short order is to look on an archive (I think Machininema.com has one), or buy the DVDs.  Also, I've had decent luck in the past searching for RvB eps with the Google "Parent Directories" trick.[/url]

Step 1: Buy regular 12oz. plastic cups.
Step 2: Call friends, tell them that party now has 12oz. jello shots.
Step 3: Watch friends drink themselves into stupidity (if friends aren't already stupid), make them do dumb things, videotape for future reference.

Yeah, wall to wall is still tricky on the keyboard.

I, too, have been suffering from Mac envy recently; a bunch of people at work are shifting from Solaris to OSX, and getting some nice machines, both work and personal.  I like the way OSX looks, the way it feels when I've tinkered with it, and I especially like that there's a UNIX-style console available.  I'd love one to tinker with, and with the new cheaper ones, I may bite at some point in the near future.

Of course, part of it is seeing SubEthaEdit in action on the Mac and thinking that it's so unbelievably cool.  I wish there were a Windows alternative.

Generally, it's not good for your HD to have the platter going while there's any motion going on; it's delicate, and a wrong jounce to the needle can damage it pretty quickly.

Then again, I know some amateur photographers that pipe high-quality shots straight to a backpack-carried laptop from a digital camera, so YMMV.

I've been using a pair of Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones for a while now.  They are, without a shadow of a doubt, the best audio equipment I've ever owned, and well worth it.  The sound cancellation is great, especially for a noisy dorm room (if I have my eyes closed, I can miss the phone ringing, and can't hear the TV over even quiet music), they're comfortable for long stretches, and the sound quality is great.