M'colleague Van Hemlock is running a feature where he details features and ideas from MMOs that he thinks are nifty, so I thought I'd steal the idea as punishment for him making us sound like a couple on Shut Up We're Talking this week. Now I can't do MMOs of course as he's doing such a good job at that so I'm going to come at it from the console angle. Very few of these ideas will be obviously MMO based, but I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that MMO as a term is what's wrong with this end of...

My challenge is currently to get Lord of the Rings to install under Mac OS X. I suspect that my far too deep knowledge of Windows, .NET and DirectX is going to be needed. I might make this into an ongoing series. More as I make progress...

One of my guilty little pleasures is Lego. There's something I find fascinating about a format called Micro, which is building really small models like this brilliant Lego Warhammer 40k Dreadnought that I came across on the big Lego picture sharing site. There are more views over at Brickshelf. I'm going to have to make me one of these, but they don't do the dark green bricks I'll need to do it right.

We've gone live with Van Hemlock episode 5. I'm not sure how that happened, but I think it had something to do with the hours of planning, chatting and then editing. Show notes: Eve! Conan! Eve! Fish! Warp Drive Active Industry! Complete recap of the plot from smallville so far! One of those may be a lie. Edit: Apparently this link is helpful if you want to actually listen to the show http://vanhemlock.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=333306

Now there's a headline designed to scare every meat eater out there! Actually it's about an app that works with Eve called Bacon that monitors the output of the logfiles and warns you when people come into local. Previously CCP had said that it's not against the EULA, and now they've clarified their stance here. "The LogServer output is solely intended by CCP as information for developers to help identify and fix bugs. While BACON, and the many similar tools currently used by a large number of players, may technically not be in violation of our EULA/TOS, we frown...

I've come across a rather interesting visualisation of Eve jumps over a 48 hour period. The actual data is here and shows the number of jumps over time, with a slider to move through time. The empire bit is pretty boring, just being a mass of jumps as you'd expect but the 0.0 movement is pretty interesting and definitely shows that things have been happening. I'm assuming that the larger movements in 0.0 are hostilities, which may not be 100% accurate but it does show that there's some big activity out there in alliance land. It's all a bit depressing...

It's past midnight on a Saturday night. I look through the list of new DVDs to watch... 2001 on blu-ray came in.. Guess I'm not getting much sleep tonight! I'd say it looks good but I'm still in the first 6 hours of noise but no picture :) *EDIT* 25 mins in. We have talking! I wish films nowadays could get away with that. *EDIT* 36 minutes in. Ohh. HD means I can read the instructions for the zero G toilet.

Let's see. I'll buy a crate of beer on the way home and I've got an xbox next to my PC. I guess that means I've got a weekend of erecting POSs ahead of me! 99% of my life in eve revolves around watching slow progress bars count down to zero. It does mean I'll get some more progress into my goal of playing all the sandbox games that have been released on the next gen consoles (unfortunately especially the bad ones) and comparing how they implement different features and what MMOs either give or could take from them. The...

I've been mentioning numbers both on the podcast and over at Killed in a smiling accident in the comments so I though I'd take a look at Sir Bruce's numbers and remove a game or three. WoW, Lineage 1 and 2 are now gone from the numbers so now that the big boys are out what do the numbers look like. Here's his graph after a couple of hits on the delete key. Well that slump in 2006 is when EQ1 lost a chunk of members and is probably down to WoW, but past that how does it...

http://www.ps3fanboy.com/2008/04/17/european-ps3-owners-up-in-arms-once-again/ I didn't know that the US store was so much better, I just assumed that it was just as bad. Sony have deleted at least one thread about it on their forums already. When will these companies learn that it just makes them look worse?

That annoying, bothersome, galling, irksome, nettlesome, irritating, vexatious writer, comedian and, so some people seem to think, actor who thinks he's so plaguy funny (Hey, I leant a new word just then while cheating and using a thesaurus and failed to make myself look clever using it!), Ricky Gervais has found yet another place to be himself on (come on, his Simpsons performance was just him being him. As was the office. And extras. And I refuse to watch Night at the Museum but I bet he's the same in that. You get my drift). Not content with being on...

The new playstation store is good, but the slow downloading is still awful. Hopefully they'll fix that as it's worse than before at the moment for trying to figure out what's available as the pictures actually download slower now Please let them do the Baltar as Jesus plot properly I'd hate to be a tactical firearm officer. I die far too much in Rainbow 6 Vegas 2. A demo for Battlezone on 360 needs more than 4 kills. This lasts 30 seconds. A demo of Rocky and Bullwinkle on the 360 is great if it isn't Marioware And it doesn't give you instructions and...

So, the full source to Eve Online has been leaked to the internet has it? Great! Oh, wait. Let's examine that statement. "Full source" and "Leaked" spring to mind, let's have a look at what the code actually is. Oh, it's just a dump of the python code that's included in the client. That's neither the full source or leaked. Oh well, an internet rumour is nothing without a bit of hype. Somebody must have done something clever to do this, and not just run it through a freely available tool. Oh, this is looking far less impressive now then....

We enjoyed making our first episode 3 so much we thought we'd have a go at an episode 4. I wonder what making an episode 5 is like? Direct Link RSS Feed Subscribe in iTunes Random selection of things we talked about: Sir Bruce's numbers - http://www.mmogchart.com/Eve Online's numbers - http://eve.coldfront.net/Top 100 games of last year - http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9639&Itemid=2 Extra bonus competition with no prize. Identify all the music, including the number that last piece is for.

Warcry have a nice piece up on Stargate Worlds, which I'm sure somebody will cover better than this. The big highlights are that they want to mix up the combat a bit and try something new (please do, we need more innovation in games!) and they think their license will be a big help. I think they're right and the game is looking somewhat gorgeous due to their choice of graphics engine, the Unreal engine, which is also used on many of the best looking games out there. They're also having minigames for classes such as the archaeologists to use...

Today the BBC  announced a "deal" with Nintendo. I have to question how far formatting a website so that it works on a specific platform can be considered a deal, but apparently it's something big. It was with some anticipation that I dug out my Wii (in this case it was literal, a minor slippage of my "to watch" DVD pile had totally buried it) and hit the internet channel to check it out. I can't say I was impressed. The aspect ratio was wrong, there's no full screen mode and the Wii doesn't seem to be powerful to display video...

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/04/08/rock-band-touring-europe-in-may-360-gets-it-first/ £130 is a bit steep, but May 27th is good by me. The timed exclusive on the 360 sorts out the question of what platform to buy it for, but then again that's the point isn't it? Now if I check my diary I notice that May 28th is a podcast recording day. I'm sure that you guys want to hear us failing to play well at all, right? Van Hemlock doesn't like to sing after he lost his job as a showgirl in Vegas, but I'm sure he can be tempted out of retirement for one more gig....

Since I can't sleep here's some things that are going through my mind. The so called next gen consoles aren't. Today was mostly spent playing GT5 Prologue and Mass Effect. GT5 can't render the full res and so needs cut down on the horizontal pixel count and scale up which makes any vertical line go wrong. Mass Effect can't load the textures fast enough off the disk and so some scenes start off with low res temp textures first. DVDs and Blu Ray just aren't fast enough for HD content in games, and neither console have enough video clout to do...

Dear Sony, I Brought a PS3. You made me buy an extra (very overpriced) cable needed to connect it via HDMI to my TV. I brought a PSP. You made me buy a (very overpriced) memory stick so that I could actually save games. I promise to forgive you this if you actually release the damn vibrating controller in the UK sometime very soon. The sixaxis is awful, I miss rumble. You lied, um, pretended that it had never had anything to do about court cases and that rumble was last gen. You've sort of admitted that...