JsARCLIGHT

Customer service is dead everywhere. I have had bad experiences at all the places people have listed that are in my town. Best Buy, Walmart, Target, you name it. The prime reason for that is (get ready to get angry at me you youngsters out there) the people these places hire are generally teens or twenty somethings that don't give a damn or middleaged uneducated blue collar schlobs that never bothered to do anything with their life other than work at a retail store. They are usually uneducated (or in the case of the kiddies in the process of trying to get educated, sometimes even doing their homework on the job), low paid, treated like crap by their management and basically told to do the grunt work that the white shirts don't want to do. If they could get away with it these places would just hire illegal aliens and pay them a shiny new nickel every other week to do the same job. The days of the educated, product saavy, overly nice and cordial professional salesman are long gone and buried. Nowadays if you do not do any homework yourself before you shop nine times out of ten you rely on some blueshirt to give you the info... and most of the time they either don't know, don't care, are talking out of their ass or have this strange "holier than thou" geek attitude that just makes you want to cave their head in. How many times have you (like me) gone into a Best Buy or Target with the soul intention of getting something specific only to bump into a blueshirt (who you don't want to talk to) who starts bagging on the thing you are about to buy and trying to sell you something else (that you know from doing your own research is a piece of crap). Blueshirts are like cops, they are never around when you need them and always around when you don't want them (sorry to all the cops out there, this saying is more appropriate for the blueshirts than cops anyway). Every other time I shop a retail chain I have a "bad experience". Either from poor salesmen, poor customer service, poor selection or just plain "I hate this place" feeling that comes over you. In their rush to shove more cheap crap into their converted barn warehouse pop up stores the main chains have totally alienated their consumer base. People expect to have rotten customer service nowadays.

山下 Yamashita (under the mountain) 駿 Shun (fast person) I'm that fast guy under the mountain... you know, Dig Dug.

My copy comes tomorrow by FedEx... still counting the hours. As for the "bad AI" thing, yeah shooting at walls is just stupid but in the original Doom game it was a strategy element that the different baddie types would attack other baddies of different styles. You could use that to your advantage big time in the later monster packed levels. Pop in a room, shoot off a few rounds and the guys in the back who would return fire at you but hit the other baddies in front of them and next thing you know a massive rumble starts. There was one level in particular near the end of Doom 1 I think that had a room full of Barons of Hell with a CyberDemon behind all of them. You walk in, shoot the Cyberdemon then run like a bunny and they all duke it out... then you waltz back in and cap the survivors.

Hoaky religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.

Gotta love that tagline: Fire Blinds, not kills says Manufacturer. Why did I suddenly have a flashback of the old Tarzan, Tonto and Frankenstien? FIIIIRE BAAAAAAD!!!

Since when are we keeping score? I hit a bird on the way home last week, how many points did that net me?... if we are using Deathrace 2000 rules.

Well, my copy left the retailer this afternoon and is on a FedEX vehicle bound for my office. Will have it in my grubby mitts on Thursday. The waaaaaaaaaiiiiiting is the hardest part...

Too true. Atari came out when I was like 11 and it sucked. We all went to the arcade to play games... or out back to the backyard to shoot things with a BB rifle. The reason? Those darn uppity Fisher Price Adventure People had it comming.

I've seen screenshots here and there and lots of glimpses of the game but it all just looks like another me-too shooter but with a horror twist. The graphics look OK, nothing ground breaking and the plot sounds straight out of the discard deck of Stargate SG-1, Buffy or Mutant X. Then again most computer games have crappy plots which are basically just there to give a reason why the main character is killing everyone. ... and what the hell is it with little ghost girls that everyone is so scared of? Yes, in the Shining those two little twins were just creepy but not scary. What is she going to do? Hit you with her teddy bear?

I think it is just the people I am around. When I went to see the movie I went with some guys from the office and when we left they were praising everyone but Shyamalan. They were saying how good the cinematography was and how interesting the costume design was. Not once did any of us even mention Shyamalan until it came to the story and we all pretty much agreed it was not the best. To us, old grizzled marketing and promotional design boys, the director holds the helm and it is his job to make the product flow. What we saw as a long drawn out one note story left us all a bit cold. I will conciede that he did a good job of directing the actors to act and getting the look and feel right but IMHO he did a poor job of telling a story. As others have said the movie feels like one long Twilight Zone episode and then at the end you start questioning the whole movie based on the twist. Not giving any spoilers here but you start asking questions about the girl that died of illness at the beginning and other "strange" things that happen that can almost account to plot holes.

Well, in Half Life one you did constantly warp between the lab dimension and the alien dimension quite a lot near the end. Of course it was only very briefly and the alien levels were pretty much super mario meets lloyd in space.

Unless he also is the cinematographer, editor, post operator, production designer, composer and all the other myriad of people working on the picture the director's true "talent" can be very well covered up by the excellence of his crew. A movie is an ensemble effort, no one man simply pulls a finished movie out of his ass... well, except for George Lucas. Good camera moves are more the camera operator and cinematographer than the director. Suspense comes from editing and the muscial composer, as well as the actors. The true "direction" of a picture does come from the director but to say he is the end all and be all of a movie is short-selling his crew. All a director does is keep a movie on target and basically "conduct" the tallents of those around him. Pretty much anyone can be a director but it takes special skills to fill all the other roles... hence why so many people become directors but you rarely hear of someone becomming a production designer or a post editor. I'm not saying Shaymalan is a terrible director in the end, I'm just saying that everyone gives him way too much credit for the movies he "makes". Just like Coppola, Spielburg and all the other "greats"... they do not make the movie themselves they have tons of help. Very rarely does a director draw the audience, it is usually the talent.

I myself believe the main failing of the "new bond" movies is the lack of a recurring omnipotent evil that bond clashes with. They killed off blowfeld which meant no more spectre, the cold war is over which means no more KGB or Russians and the new world order of "tech gets us the intel" has all but eliminated the age old "Spy" from the forefront of popular culture. Having bond fight evil businessmen is about as fun was watching a Dilbert movie with a CGI Dogbert. I will also blame the "new bond" on cometition in the spy movie ilk. Before the Borne movies came out there was a piece of schlock called Mission: Impossible that gave bond a run for his money. M:I featured more action, more crazy stunts, more nutso over the top no real spy would do this crap sort of things and people ate it up. So rather than originate the bond makers decided to duplicate and thus you have the latest bond blah. All the tension and the danger and suspenseful espionage is gone and replaced by them trying to see what evil kenievel bond vehicle move they can pull off this time. Plus with the seeming inability to release a movie without a video game tie in, marketing blitz, soundtrack album and music video the whole process has wound down to formula rather than caring whether or not the audience likes it. Attract them into the theater with eye candy, get their money and run. I myself will keep watching the Borne movies rather than Bond. They both start with a B but one of them does not end with a "sucks".

I agree with that on a lot of levels mainly because all he seems to do now are these creepy suspense movies with a crap in your popcorn twist. I liked Sixth Sense because it was new and interesting... Unbreakable was predictable but interesting... Signs, if not for the decent acting was bad... and now the Village, once again if not for the decent acting it would be so awful I could not stand it. Shyamalan is not the god everyone makes him out to be as his movies are most often saved by their actors than their stories. A good cast can save even the worst of scripts just like a bad cast can ruin the best of scripts.

To be honest, America has several levels of "adult". In some states the age of consent for sex is as low as 13 or 14 but in some states you cannot procecute someone as an adult if they are under 21. Some states let you drive a car at 16 but you can't vote till 18 or own a handgun legally until 21. Then when it comes to the juvenile courts system if the perp is close to the age cutoff (let's say the perp is 16 and the age cutoff for prosecution as an adult is 18) sometimes the prosecutor will take steps have them tried as an adult. Heck, sometimes they even bend that rule to take 14 year olds to trial as adults. It's all in how terrible the crime is and how "mature" the perp is.

I totally forgot I owed you guys pics of my G21 in this thread. My sony digicam shot craps a few days ago when I was attempting to take pics for an auction. Give me some time to get a replacement and I'll get that pic up.

My personal comp's specs are: 3.02 Ghz Pent 4 HT with a gig of RAM on an ASUS motherboard, Raedon 9800 PRO card. It has handled everything with ease so far (despite a small glitch with far cry that had to be ironed out). From looking at the minimum system requirements for Doom 3 and running the Alpha on this box I should be able to play it in full/full with no issues... or at least I hope to.

Not to derail the thread any further but the main issue with firearms in the US is the number of firearms in the possession of the wrong people illegaly. Almost all criminals do not walk into a gun shop and buy their guns, they get them illicitly. Steal them, buy them from crooked people, heck even make their own... the folly of firearms in America is they are too easy to get by people who have no business with them. I firmly believe it is every american's right to bear arms (or arm bears if they can hit the ten ring) as long as there is a process in place to see to it only the "right people" who have been trained and proven capable of handling them and the responsibilities that come with them can have access to them. I'm sure the founding fathers would agree that a crack addicted street urchin or methed up trailer slime has no business possessing a firearm of any sort, no matter what their "inalienable rights" under the constitution may be.

I also really truly want HL2 and not Doom 3... but HL2's constant delays and push-backs got me soooooo angry at waiting for the game. I was having flashbacks of waiting for Daikatana all over again. The real main reason I want Doom3 badly now is to test the moxie of my "new" computer. The whole reason I bought a new box was so I could play these next gen games... and other than the gorgeous Far Cry I have yet to see a truly "next gen" game from anyone yet. Perhaps Doom3 will sate my thirst for next level.

Why did this mental picture of Timothy Dalton flash through my mind? A "Yonger, Hipper" Bond, eh? No thanks. I'll take my Classic Bond thank you very much.

OK, I have officially had it with this troll. It was not enough that I was on his side before he started all this crap. It is not enough that he keeps instigating this further (of course if you are to ask him he is not to blame, typical). It is not enough that he is PMing people on this board constantly to keep this bitchfest going. It is not enough that he keeps PMing me with increasingly violent tones. It is not enough that I block him from sending me PMs because then he just decides to email me and continue to spew his hate. SOMEONE FREAKING BAN THIS TURKEY ALREADY. What does he have to do before someone will ban him? Hack the board? He is already harrassing everyone in this thread, even those that just slightly post nonsense in the thread get it. He contributed nothing to the board in the first place and every piece of anything he has contributed so far is nothing but noise and hate. Oh and ValkDelight, I really really like being threatened with violence and being harrased over PM and email. You keep accusing US of being the violent and combative ones... well guess what shnook you have been on the OFFENSIVE with me the whole time. I wanted to let bygones be bygones and just let you state your mind and walk out of here but nooooooooooo you have to keep contradicting yourself and engaging in a campaign of harrassment and aggression. I told you once and I'll tell you again, fark off you annoying little crap. Quit calling people "hostile westerners" and "kids" as you are displaying all the traits of those yourself.

Will someone ban this ass already? I'm sick of getting his Lamb-Chop "who? me? Bad?" PM's.

I pre-ordered my copy months ago. Getting free overnight on it when it comes out so on the 4th I'll be up and playing. Now if Valve will only unclench their ass and release HL2 already... geez...

Ex, I did not mean to say you were helping him in any way... this guy just seems to get his rocks off on telling all of us how much better being an asian and being raised in an asian family is. But apparently if you mouth off in asia they drag you out in the street and kill you... or at least according to our resident expert on the asian culture and it's vast superiority over us. I have been trying my hardest to just imagine this guy is a confused person who is fumbling with the english language and his inability to properly and politely express his feelings in a language other than his native tongue... but going back and re-reading most of his posts and PMs that others have posted this guy definately does have a firm grip on the english language and a lot of it's nuances. He understands exactly what he is saying and what he is accusing us of. Thus he should know that HE is responsable for this mess. HE brought this uppon himself. This is not a bunch of arrogant combative westerners crushing his poor little straw hut and burning it to the ground in a rice paddy somewhere, rather this is a bunch of normal people reacting (in some cases reacting with loud report) to a douche bag. This thread would have dissapeared in seconds if he had not contradicted his own posts and kept comming back to "Get some". I think big asian parental unit mods should drag him out into the street and kill him for his insubordinate and aggressive attitude here. He said that is what they do in asia so it must be the right thing to do. And ValkDelight if you are still reading this: Dude. No. Just stop already if you have not done so. I know you know what you are saying and I know you know you are instigating all of this. You claim one thing and do another to somehow force the outcome to prove your point. You are the Jimmy Swaggart of hypothesis. Your own clouded notions and personal predjudice have created the exact same problems you complain about. Just go home, suppress those feelings and try to keep mama and poppa from dragging you out into the street and killing you for having an emotion or stating your mind. Sounds more like you are a communist stooge than a free thinking person. You can travel to any part of the world you want and form your predjudices but until you experience true emotional and ideological freedom you don't know crap.

I think I'll have to go see this as well. As for Matt and Trey "liking" Michael Moore it is irrellivant. The South Park boys have proven time and again that they attack all sides on an issue and somehow in the process (usually through the mouths of Stan or Kyle) give their own feelings on the matter. I myself love most of their parody as it is hard not to... the thing to remember, as they have said it themselves, is that all their movies and shows are designed so they can yell at america about issues. But unlike a lot of hardcore crazy partisan people they bash everyone equally. I think that is why I like them so much as they have most of my personal views.