Zelos

I deleted Wipeout the first time I saw a video advert, I'm not going to reinstall until Sony remove the adverts. I complained to Sony customer services about it as well - I only got the stock "Thank you for your comments" reply, but if enough people complain it might make a difference.

I paid for the game already, I think it's appalling that Sony would retroactively add adverts to a game like this.

I'd guess that it's a similar principle to the "going equipped for theft" laws. Carrying a twisted coathanger isn't illegal, but if you're stopped by the police at 1AM in a car park with one the police are going to charge you.

I'm glad it finally died, it's been on borrowed time for months. Slow, inefficient, buggy, overly complex, poor UI and difficult to develop for, I don't think it had any redeeming features.

"Motorola and Sony Ericsson have signed up to contribute UIQ assets..."

Damn, my first thought when I saw the headline was "maybe that will finally kill off UIQ". No such luck.

What Valve do with cutscenes in their games is excellent. Particularly in HL2:Ep2 the pacing is perfect, so the semi-interactive cutscenes kick in just when you need a bit of a break from the action anyway. The writing, voice acting, timing and direction are head and shoulders above most games.

The way that they tell as much of the story in-game is excellent. Rather than taking a 10 minute cutscene explaining what's going on they just allow the game world itself to tell you. Things like radio broadcasts, background chatter etc.

Quick question - are all the cutscenes as bad as the clips on Youtube? The two intro scenes I've seen are pretty terrible - badly written, embarrassingly voiced, overly long and far too slow. I guess Kojima has never heard of compression.

But are they the exception?

Mining from the beginning is definitely the way to go, bronze bars are going for 10-15G on my server at the moment. That's a lot of cash for little work, especially for a lowbie like me.

Whoever wrote the review seems to lack basic English knowledge - how can something be "somewhat unique"? Either it's unique or it's not. Not that Gamespot is exactly the place to go for good writing.

There is often a trade-off between memory usage and performance.

With something like 15% of the memory of the bigger consoles, those trade offs might make less sense on the Wii. Code size has very little to do with memory usage.

You could clearly see some of the DS tracks in the Mario Kart Wii demo movie Nintendo showed recently (at E3?).