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Posts Tagged things_that_suck

ThingsThatSuck : People trying to get Creationism taught as an alternative to evolution

Aug 6

Posted by rory in everything else | No Comments

Why is this even being discussed? Its a fucking joke! Evolution is a scientifically endorsed theory, and although there may be credible alternatives to that theory, the idea that some big bearded diety magically clicked his fingers and wished everything into existence is a BUNCH OF FUCKING RUBBISH.

Believe what you want to believe in your own home, but don’t try and teach this shit to kids as a national strategy. This all comes back to one solitary thing. Bush wants everyone to be christian, and he’s gone to fucking enormous lengths to push this vision. Creationism is a christian belief, and teaching it in schools in the US means you are teaching children to be christian, even when their parents might not be raising them that way.

Of course, this is just one more sign that the US is well and truly fucked. You idiots gave a second term to the man who cut your social welfare, medical service, drilled for oil in wildlife reserves, re-ignited nuclear proliferation with the invasion of two middle-eastern countries and threats against North Korea and Iran, cut your freedom to ribbons with the patriot act, started building more nukes and threatening a variety of countries with them including russia – an ALLY of the US, pissed all over the legal system, appointed his own selection of supreme court judges who piss all over the constitution to give him whatever powers he wants, pissed all over the UN by ignoring them all the time and vetoing EVERYTHING they do, appointing John Fucking Bolton to be the US-UN ambassador, gave tax breaks to the super rich, protected members of his cabinet guilty of various crimes from prosecution, tried to stop the formation of a world court for war criminals, but the whole country into debt by spending $400,000,000,000 on the ‘war on terror’ and lied to every one of you about almost everything. In fact, he’s done an awful lot more than that but I just don’t have the time to list everything.

And you gave him a second term. And we all know in three years time, Jeb Bush will sweep into power, and again four years after that, and by then, the bush klan will have successfully dismantled the constitution, and will most likely declare some kind of state of emergency, allowing them to stay in power indefinitely, and turn america into an monarchy. Thats assuming that hostility against Iran and North Korea hasn’t sparked a nuclear war, irradiated the surface of the earth and destroyed thousands of years of human culture by then.

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ThingsThatSuck : This.

Jul 13

Posted by rory in everything else | No Comments

I cannot believe that its come to this. Rockstar is talking about attempting to actively block fan-made mods from working, all because the ESRB is hot on their arses about the hot coffee mod. Well fuck them. As maddox would say, Eat shit already. Those wankers CODED THE FUCKING THING IN THE FIRST PLACE. All that mod did was unlock what they’d created themselves. And now they’re trying to make the mod community take the fall.

FUCK YOU GUYS. You know well thats not user created content. It was out within days of the release of the game. if it was fanmade, it would take weeks to program. Using your proprietary system, its next to impossible to add fan-made character animation, and Hot-coffee contains an awful lot of custom stuff that wouldn’t fit in anywhere else. On top of that, it contains voice-overs by the same guy who voices CJ in the game. Please explain to me how an amateur modder in the netherlands managed to hire the same guy to do new voice work? You can’t can you. You LYING FUCKERS!

From the Rockstar Press Release:

“So far we have learned that the “hot coffee” modification is the work of a determined group of hackers who have gone to significant trouble to alter scenes in the official version of the game,” reads Rockstar’s official statement. “In violation of the software user agreement, hackers created the ‘hot coffee’ modification by disassembling and then combining, recompiling and altering the game’s source code. Since the ‘hot coffee’ scenes cannot be created without intentional and significant technical modifications and reverse engineering of the game’s source code, we are currently investigating ways that we can increase the security protection of the source code and prevent the game from being altered by the ‘hot coffee’ modification.”

For all of your information, the Hot-Coffee modification install routine requires you to replace one file. ONE FILE. This is the main.scm file, which contains the code for the game and minigames. it does not contain models. it does not contain textures. it does not contain character animation. It does not contain audio files, voice overs, cound effects or anything. It does not contain geometry. All it does is set the game to uncensored, and set your rating with your ‘girlfriends’ to 100%, so that they’ll sleep with you immediately, instead of after days and days of attention.

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ThingsThatSuck : People who blow up other people for any reason.

Jul 8

Posted by rory in everything else | No Comments

4 explosions in london this morning, and 37 people killed.

I could go on about how its ‘nothing compared to the number of innocent people killed in iraq’ or words to that effect, but just because these people were in london and not baghdad, it doesn’t make them any less innocent, or any less dead.

We shouldn’t be arguing about who’s got a more impressive death-toll, and we shouldn’t waste time yelling about how terrible the terrorists are. We should be asking how did we arrive at a situation where the capital cities of europe are being targeted by terrorists because of something bush and his cronies did?

I’m certainly not defending the actions of a bunch of religious nuts who blow up people who have nothing to do with anything. They’re just sick bastards. But the bastards who twist events to suit their own agenda hours after it happens are even sicker.

I read a news story that said (roughly, not word for word) ’4 years after 9/11, the terrorists are still in a position to launch an attack on london. We still haven’t beaten them’

WAKE THE FUCK UP!

Invading the country that some of these terrorists came from and killing their entire extended familes with a daisy cutter is NOT going to dissuade them from attacking you! Would it dissuade you? If you knew someone who died in the twin towers, in madrid, in bali, Did it? Or did it piss you off, and make you crave justice, or even revenge?

This kind of retaliation will never amount to anything. You can’t fight a guerrilla army with violence. It will Never Ever Work.

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ThingsThatSuck : That a picture of an Ak-47 is still considered ‘Progress’ in the world of Modding.

Jun 27

Posted by rory in everything else, games | No Comments

Yup. Every third post or so on planethalflife.com and planetunreal.com is a render of an ak-47, or a glock.

Well done. You’ve really made a lot of progress.

AM I THE ONLY FUCKING PERSON WHO THINKS ITS MORONIC THAT EVERY SINGLE MOD HAS TO REMODEL THE SAME WEAPONS OVER AND OVER????

Really, at this stage of the game, wouldn’t it make more sense if there was a set of free ak-47 models out there that people could use for their mods? Its not a huge task to convert 3d formats. Its not like Mikhail Kalashnikov is going to sue you.

Is it any wonder so few mods ever see the light of day when so many man-hours are wasted making more and more ak-47s? and not just AKs. Think of all the mods that have gotten just as far as modelling an AK, a glock, a FiveSeven, a colt 45, a beretta 92fs, a USP, a walther p99, a desert eagle, a .44 magnum, a Sig Sauer, an Uzi, a mac-10, a generic sniper rifle, a barrett .50, an M-4, an M-16, a FN-P90, a Steyr AUG, an AK-74, a benelli shotgun, a franchi, a remington, a SPAS-12, an M-79 Grenade Launcher, and of course the ever present MP5, or MP5-N (just to be different).

Its a colossal and monumental waste of effort, and so few mods ever make it past that stage. How many more user created mods would we have if they didn’t have to go through this crap EVERY SINGLE TIME? Probably the same amount. But I’d be less pissed off about it.

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ThingsThatSuck : wanky flash sites

Jun 24

Posted by rory in everything else | No Comments

A stunning revelation has just hit me: wanky flash sites suck balls

but allow me to elaborate.
Five years ago, they were confounding, almost magical.
Four years ago, they were very professional.
Three years ago, they were quite cool.
Two years ago, they were trendy.
A year ago, they were getting more common.

Now, they suck balls. Alright. Flash is impressive. Some people can use it, some people can’t. Some of those who can choose to use it to animate cartoons, to make really swish sites, to do funky effects such as page flipping, to make games or to make very professional looking sites. Some even use it to make working applications (such as visual networking tools etc.)

But there are some out there who choose to use their flash skills to create brainfuckingly complex wank-pieces. When did it become the norm for sites to be incomprehensible and ridiculously difficult to navigate? When did cryptic icons without explanation or labelling become okay? The internet is too vast and life’s too short to spend a whole minute waiting for an cryptic introductory flash movie to play, or figuring out which is the menu and what goes where.

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ThingsThatSuck : Progress bars that in no way represent how much time you have left to wait

Jun 21

Posted by rory in everything else | No Comments

I’m talking install bars now. I just installed the drivers for a logitech quickcam. The first ‘progress’ bar flew to the end in seconds, then hung there for ten minutes while at least seven other progress bars popped up and pretended to represent things. Then a notice telling me it was finished uninstalling devices popped up. Thank god I’m computer literate enough to know whats going on behind the scenes here, because I think I’d put my fist through the monitor if I had to sit through a ten minute install routine that then told me I had just UNinstalled something.

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ThingsThatSuck : that rockstar won’t release level editing tools

Jun 18

Posted by rory in everything else, games | No Comments

Its pretty evident from the sheer amount of mods for GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas that there is a demand for user created content. And yet, despite rockstar having all the time and incentive in the world to produce such tools, they still haven’t.

Fans have proven that even if the tools aren’t available, they’ll make mods. Its strange really. FarCry (yes I’m talking about it again – so what?) was released under the banner of ‘easiest game to create mods for’. it came with a full level editor that lets you paint on vegetation like you were painting a moustache on tom cruise, and drag and drop any item into the game world, THEN press CTRL+G to INSTANTLY play from wherever your viewpoint is currently residing. Morrowind came with all the development tools needed, and support was provided. The editor was another drag and drop jobbie, even easier to use than FarCry, even if the results could be a little clunky. The Unreal series kicked off the whole concept of developers including the tools used to build the game in the release (Actually duke got there first, but I’m not sure if build was the exact tool they used…). And thus far every Unreal game has come with a full set of editing tools. Every Doom game has had an editor. Every Quake Game. Every Wolfenstein Game. Halflife. Warcraft. Jedi Knight. Medal of Honour. (altho they weren’t much good). Call of Duty. Max Payne. Rune. Counterstrike. Deus Ex. Thief. Battlefield 1942. America’s Army. Almost every major game you can think of has had an official toolset release. Granted most of those were based on either the quake or unreal engine, but they all had custom tools, all released officially.

With Vice City on the other hand, people had to actually handcode the tools used to extract files, replace files, change anything at all in fact. They even wrote a multiplayer add on for chrissake.

And yet Vice city has so many mods for it. Why? Well there’s a few reasons.

1) The Vice graphics engine is quite low res, and the viewpoint is mostly 3rd person, so less detail is required in the models. (altho admittedly this doesn’t make much difference)

2) While they haven’t provided tools (or official help to my knowledge), Rockstar have used a format that allows addition of extra weapons and vehicles fairly easily. And Really, the bulk of these mods are either new weapons, vehicles or player skins.

3) POPULARITY. The big one. There are hundreds of thousands of GTA players out there, and since its a nonlinear game that can be player indefinitely, there’ll always be people looking to slightly alter the experience. But can you imagine how many user made mods there would be for Vice City if it had tools like the games listed above?

A LOT. Thats how many. There would be entire new cities to choose from, most likely real world ones from fans around the globe. New missions, characters and abilities would be added. And I guess thats the problem Rockstar have. Any really creative mods could limit rockstar’s future release options. But I still don’t think thats a good enough excuse.

So it still sucks balls.

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that I have to add this addenum to the previous post, coz it makes me look stupid.

Jun 17

Posted by rory in everything else | No Comments

Last post I raised the issue of the number of FarCry sites in german despite the game being banned there. I thought it was outrageously strange and more than a little amusing. However it turns out (and I should have known this) CryTek, developers of FarCry (and the incredible engine it runs on) are german. Makes sense I suppose.

FarCry had physics before HalfLife 2, Stencil shadows and bump mapping before Doom 3, and lush jungle environments before Boiling Point. And also, it kicks ass. Let me just say that again. It kicks AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSS!

Except for the voice acting, which sucked balls.

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ThingsThatSuck : …and while we’re on the subject of far cry…

Jun 15

Posted by rory in everything else, games | No Comments

No complaints here, just an observation

FarCry is banned in Germany, yet a disproportionate amount of far cry sites (the ones that are actually there anyway) are in german aswell as english!

WHY???

I mean, its great that they are – being a very keen EU citizen I really wish more sites were multilingual. Its just so strange that so many are in german when they game isn’t even officially available in germany!

go figure.

anyway far cry rocks, especially multiplayer because:

1. As stoopid as your LAN buddys can be, they’re almost always smarter than AI players.

2. There’s none of that awful voice acting! Woohoo!

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ThingsThatSuck : The commitment level of far cry modding teams

Jun 14

Posted by rory in everything else, games | No Comments

Having recently discovered how much fun it is to play FarCry multiplayer over say, any other LAN game of the last few years (I’m looking at you counterstrike, World of warcraft, UT2004, Halflife, Wolfenstein ET etc.) I decided to hit the official FarCry site in order to procure some mods and up the gaming experience that little bit. Here’s what I found upon clicking the links in the mod section. Bear in mind that the official far cry site has been updated as recently as may 2004.

Warning – some readers may be disturbed by the sheer shite-ness of it all.

ahem.

Citizen-132 – officially closed. pity.

CryFortress – site down

Dark Blood – Apocalypse Tommorrow – says its now a wrestling mod for HL2??? I don’t get the connection.

David hunter – site down

DeathCry – gives official release date as ‘the end of 2004!’. So where is it, bitch?

Drug wars – no sign of drug wars. instead there’s something called ‘squad engine’, which appears to be a set of online ‘tools’ to manage your own clan or something. So that’d be some sort of electronic mail account then?

Exstruck – site down

farGate – site down

Hydroracers – this is a multigame mod, but only the battlefield 1942 version has had a release. the HL2 and Farcry versions haven’t got a look in. The frontpage proudly proclaims that the mod has been featured on TV. But I’m guessing it was on the tail-end of a game program, and not on its own documentary.

jungle combat – no site, just the words ‘under CONTRuction’. Since they couldn’t even spell ‘construction’ correctly, I’m not too excited about what it is they’re building. I’ll bet it involves frontpage though.

Maya Underworld – not updated since August 2004

Navy Seals – site down

Op. Archangel – site down

Op. Bermuda – hasn’t been updated since december 2004 last year.

Pandora Forces – site down

Parallel Futures – not updated since june 2004

Particle Cities – site down

Project Lilith – ‘currently offline’

Sixth Extinction – site down. Extinct obviously.

Survival – last updated August 2004.

The Forgotten War – appears to have been forgotten yet again, despite an update which says the mod is back in production, full swing, there are no downloads in any category, and no screenshots of anything. at all.

X-isle – theres a picture of some guy apparently having a threesome with two dinosaurs, and a banner that says ‘new site coming soon’. I can hardly wait.

August 2004. Did something happen at this point in history to halt the progress of so many mods? Maybe we’ll never know. Actually, if I remember correctly, it was at this point that a whole pile of mods decided to go ‘On Strike’ (Hah!) until CryTek released the SDK, which they did the following month anyway. Obviously most of the modders on strike never realised this, and are probably still picketing outside their various homes all across the USA. Stoopid people.

So in fact, out of all 28 mods listed, only 5 are active: INCorporated, Jedi Timeline (yuck), Tacto, HARD, and the Cerebus Protocol.

And out of those, only Tacto has a download available. And what the fuck is with you star wars heads? if you WANT to make a bloody jedi mod, why not use one of the countless Jedi Knight games out there instead? You people amaze me with your sheer single mindedness. you’ve clearly got only a single mind between all of you.

Thankfully there are still plenty of map makers out there.

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