chiefwhosm

Old Unreal (the group Epic allowed to keep patching the original games) announced via their Discord channel that Epic have permitted them to host .iso files of Unreal and Unreal Tournament for anyone to download/play.

"I'm afraid this is an absolutely typical UK government response." - I'd say it's a much better response than most petitions get. Also, in regards to Trading Standards, it's true that they're online form is only at the weekends, but that's because (presumably) they don't work weekends. The telephone lines to get a direct response are open weekdays only. I can't answer Ross' questions, but the BlackBeltBarrister may be someone he should contact - it's only England and Wales (so no Scotland/Northern Ireland - and no idea about the Channel Islands): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrmxzSIf7J66qvlOAT9AlZQ The AboutMe page on the YT channel says that "for formal advice, please contact [email protected]." Also the references to 'government', doesn't mean it'll be the same government by Autumn.

Physical discs aren't entirely coasters, they're mainly now aimed at people with slow internet, install some of the game, then download the rest ... and find the newer patches are probably bigger than what you managed to install from disc ;-) Also, sometimes the physical discs are cheaper than the digital version even when a game is newly released (it's why my version of Dishonored 2 was a physical purhcase). I recently started re-playing GTA SA. I couldn't be bothered using my original 1.0 disc, so used my steam copy which has whatever patches are in it. It's been a very buggy (both graphical and gameplay) journey and none of the bugs I've experienced ever occured replaying my 1.0 game, which also leads on to feature removals etc. I can't recall which game it was (it'll have been free off the Epic store or GoG) that I recently installed, but it was the first time I'd actually seen a EULA where it clearly stated they could remove any feature at any point from the game and you HAD to comply with your game being modified and accept it. There was further text in the EULA saying they could modify the game in any way they saw fit. On the one side I guess it was nice they freely admit to that, since buyers could in theory reject the EULA and request a refund, but it still made me glad it was free because really, who'd want to pay for a game that they might come back to years later and find that the game had been modified so much as to no longer be the same game.

So I re-watched this video yesterday and it got me wondering if there was a demo to try out, tried the original site on archvie.org and eventually got the demo - but from ausgamers as the archive.org version kept corrupting. Anyway, on the original site is a 'making of' video amongst other things which is quite interesting, especially because of the chosen music... https://web.archive.org/web/20040512210642/http://www.microsoft.com/games/DungeonSiege/8.asp Also someone in the thread linked to Scott Bilas' blog which is no longer online, so here's the archive link for it too: https://web.archive.org/web/20170519211136/http://scottbilas.com:80/games/dungeon-siege

Journalist 1 is a Broadsheet journalist. Journalist 2 is a Tabloid journalist. ?(double plus good emoticon).

Back in 2002/3 I got into 3d modelling and learning Maya PLE. Maya has a PIE/radial menu and at the time I found myself thinking it would just be so much better for Windows to just be a wallpaper and a click anywhere to open PIE menu. Similar to the way some desktops in Linux had for their start menus and the way Ross has it set up with Light Step. So the end of the video where you show programs akin to the PIE menu showed that I wasn't the only one who felt this would be a step in the right direction, but not with huge circles of hundreds of icons. I did once try customising Windows but I just found the programs to override things so clunky that the end user experience to get an end user experience wasn't worth the effort involved. I used to work in IT and was around when Offices' UI changed from 2003 (icons) to 2007 (ribbon interface) and the amount of complaints from people using Office saying such things as "Why couldn't they leave it as it was" and "Can we still use the old version" etc. Of course over time the complaints lessened, and people became used to the Ribbon UI and now it's the norm for Office. I agree that a new UI where everything is fluid and natural to anyone using it for the first time will propel any new UI forwards towards a global adoption, but most people don't want to adopt anything new, they just want to go to work, do the job as it is now and most importantly get paid. I remember the training when Windows 8 came in to try and persuade us all to use it, as someone in IT I got asked what I thought of 8 and I'm not entirely sure my response that I hated it was the response the trainign people expected from me :) While it's true Microsoft did try to revamp the UI with 8 and Metro the implementation was flawed. 8.1 was a major improvement compared to 8 in that it was less clunky to use but it's still very restrictive in how you customise the interface. I feel Windows 10 is what Windows 8 should have been in terms of customising the interface layout, or to put it another way - the UI we're all using now, belongs to 2012 - so just imagine what improvements could have been made 8 years on. I do get the feeling Microsoft are trying to win back the whole "I'm a mac and I'm a PC" user base. Simplify everything, restrict everything so your novice user can't break anything. Restrict choice and your OS will be better, people will find it more stable since if you can't break anything it won't need fixing. That way anyone can learn Windows, no one needs to delve into the control panel, and if anything goes wrong beyond a novice users' expertise then there's the support people at Microsoft, and also just the normal IT businesses to do anything else required. Let's face it, Windows 10 has been so restricted that even something as simple as a slideshow wallpaper can involve registry edits if you don't like their predefined change times. As to your (Ross) move from 7 to 10 and customisation. I reckon you'll hit a brick wall. Windows 10 isn't just cutting down on what a novice can do, it's also restricting things an advanced user would want to do. An example in my case are disabling Windows services. There have always been protected services, but now there seem to be so much more, and they rely on others. A long time ago I created a gaming performance app, it basically drops you to safemode + any additional services you required and had a custom launcher that listed all games on your PC and ran them. I actually had the 2013 TombRaider running with max settings (bar AA) and tress-fx hair running on an old bootcamped mac mini and Windows 7 the program worked so well. The program worked fine up until 10's release but now it's next to useless because even after running it you still end up with 30-40+ services still running (compared to the 8 or so it used to be). In terms of custom shells, back in my IT job I had to image machines, which at the time meant using Windows PE which didn't provide a file manager. 7-zips' 7z-fm worked as a really great alternative and of course it has the added bonus of in-built archive de/compression. As to your problem with copy/paste - I only experience that from Firefox into another program and yes, it does seem to have been happening more and more and it's very, very annoying ! Couldn't help but feel while watching the video that you feel like the mouse should be akin to a vehicles steering wheel, always one hand on the wheel at all times. At the end of the day I just use Windows as-is, there's things I'd change of course, but I can't so I work round them :-)

If anything bad had happened to either planet we'd know about it because Q would have judged Picard and humanity on it ?

In the part of the video about streaming I notice when pausing the video to read the article that the UBISoft CEO specifically says that streaming will allow them to provide a smooth experience in big cities which implies that they may not care if the rest of a countries' internet won't reliably support their product providing there's a big enough target audience in areas that do (though I presume the article was cut off so maybe they went into more depth). If they didn't go into more depth they may be relying on the fact that even remote areas with poor internet (at least where I live) often have 3G/4G signal strengths for mobile devices to stream on. I was surprised when Ross was talking about poor internet he didn't highlight that section of the text about big cities' experience since I felt it drove home the point he was making about reliable internet. I do agree that streaming as the only option is a bad idea since you're basically buying a dream and one day you'll wake up and it will just be a memory of the dream and no physical substance. Ironically one of the better experiences of an online singleplayer game I've had where the connection to the central server couldn't be established (though my internet was working) was UBISofts' Black Flag where it prompted to say that online purchases wouldn't be available in game until the server connection was established and would I like to proceed to play without them? I realise this would annoy people who if the server went down forever would lose their additional purchases but at least it implied you could still play the game. Talking of online singleplayer reminds me of a big annoyance for me where I suffered greatly at the hands of GTA V a few days ago. I decided on a game of singleplayer and was met with a 5+gig patch which as far as I can tell was all new content for GTA Online, so I had to sit through a huge patch just to get to the singleplayer game. Worse was the update server was under heavy load and timing out constantly so it was a day later before things had quietened down enough to get the patch and finally make it into the single player portion of the game. I don't think singleplayer should be like that As to Steam DRM, it isn't even in the future that problems have arisen with games being hooked into it. A few years ago now I bought the first two Hitman games. Installed them, tried to play them. Not happening, up prompts a window telling me the Steam dll could not be found. Luckily other people had worked out the problem and found a work around (copy the latest steam dll from the steam install folder and put a copy into each games folder) but we shouldn't have to do things like that. If a game is up on Steam it should really work out of the box as far as Valves' responsibility goes. I have a similar gripe when it comes to GOG. I like GOG, I like that they're bringing back older games, that they won't put DRM in their games and so forth, so don't get me wrong. However I've purchased games from them that just don't work, the games aren't supported, aren't patched to run on modern systems (some wouldn't even load) correctly or at all so when it doesn't work you just can't play and again as Ross said in the video we have to rely on other people (he said pirates but I'd say there are people who aren't pirating the game since they usually only patch the exe meaning you still need to have bought the rest of the game) who are both fans of the game and know what they're doing to help patch the game so it runs. Again, if GOG is selling these games they should make sure they run because otherwise what's the point? I was interested in how Ross' view that adding redundancy into a game at the start of development to allow it to be converted from a central server setup to allow for private servers in the future would actually work. If for example the game stored information to a database backend (such as say character customisation) would the only way to allow it to run on a private server be to remove such functionality from the game and have the game converted to an experience akin to say HL2-DM where you have 8? characters to choose from and that's that - because I could see people losing access to the core experiences of a game such as in this example character customisation being nearly as upset as if the whole game shut down. One final point to make about Steam dropping XP/Vista is it also means that for me at any rate, my linux wine installation of steam (I dual boot due to all the past fun with Windows 10 upgrades breaking my games - some of them not that old either, which does drive home the points in the video somewhat) no longer functions correctly as originally you had to run steam as a Windows XP machine, but now with them dropping support if you change it to run as Windows 7+ you get a crash and the friends list doesn't work. Not a big deal currently since the games library works still, but how long before something breaks with that. Okay so I'm sure the people who contribute to wine will sort it out in the future but again, we're having to rely on others to help keep things running for us. @RaTcHeT302 - Max Payne 1/2 - for me the only requirement to make them run was using ReShade.

I didn't see this anywhere online when I searched to see if I'd just missed the news so maybe it's only just happened today with no prior warning. While not exactly a game being killed off I spotted today when I logged into Origin that the on the house offer on the Origin website now redirects to EA's monthly/annual Origin Access page and the button in the origin launcher has been removed. It was there only yesterday/the day before since I'd been checking regularly knowing it was close to their ~2-3 month gap between free on the house releases. Shame really, I'd sort of hoped they may have got round to releasing a few of their under £10, better known titles for me to nab

I too expected a Frohman style end to the Vort. and for those who want to read/re-read/know what we're talking about - here's the authors' comic site: http://www.screencuisine.net/hlcomic/index.php?date=2005-05-01 And the unofficial sequel which for me no longer loads, so an archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20150420011515/http://aconcernedrip-off.webs.com/apps/photos/

@St.Goliath, but do we know if Ely is really Alyx's father or should Gordon "be aware of unforeseen consequences". Either way I reckon Ross' response will be accurate but its something I always pondered about, probably because I played HL2 before HL1 and really did think the hair looked similar. In truth his reply is how I felt about the new Mirrors Edge game.

On the subject of spider-bot like "you can't handle the truth" scenarios since it opens up a whole load of "hmmm" questions: Do you think the baby photo shown in Gordon Freemans' locker in Half-Life is in fact the baby Alyx Vance? (the hair for one is similar and some people reckon ~20-ish years elapsed between 1 and 2).

When you said about not handing control over of the nuclear weapons to A.I. in the video, it reminded me of an article in the Times about what problems the millennium bug caused that weren't made public at the time. The one item I remember of them all was the Russian (or I believe it said it was Russian) nuclear missiles computer supposedly reported a large missile attack on the country and advised the people in the control room to launch an immediate nuclear counter attack. The general in charge decided it was a computer glitch and decided not to destroy the world.

Just wanted to say that I've found APB:R to become seriously laggy at times on servers with high load to the point it's usually worth joining another zone. I realise my internet connection last time I played wasn't brilliant but my friends on cable also suffered as much as I did and they don't normally lag. You mentioned which hitman game to play to get a better feel for the overall experience while still allowing leeway when things go horribly wrong and I would say my own view (that I suspect will be shared with others) would be blood money. However in saying that if you want a mix of the ease of blood money and some of the difficulty of hitman 1 (I find it the hardest game of all of them) then I'd suggest contracts. On another note, in the Boppin game dungeon episode, it's mentioned that when your character cries you lose a life yet in the twitch steam feed the lives rarely went down when he cried - so is it random life loss in the game or was something strange happening?

Just a thanks to HaroldPortato for the link - in the end just had to revert my save and then continue with many different saves as a precaution until I finished the game. Anyway: 1) Old Games, New Computers - *sigh* (As seen in previous post). 2) The passengers soon realised their mistake on asking for the scenic route. 3) Between a rock and a hard place. Chief