ChaosInTheSnow

$4.99 for the summer house? I was connected earlier (from Ireland) and it listed the summer house as costing 0.75 euro. I thought that seemed a bit cheap, given that a futon cost 1 euro. Pricing error I guess. If I hadn't been so bored with what I saw I might have bought it. It was "high in the mountains" after all.

I'm thankful for noticing a thin object very slightly protruding from the disc drive on my Macbook this morning. Cos I carefully fished it out with a hairpin and it turned out to be my credit card.

I can't say for certain, but I'm pretty sure the disc drive on my Mac would have been one of the last places I looked for it (especially since it sucks the disc in like a PS3). I'm still a little confused as to how it made it in there in the first place. Online shopping gone horribly wrong?....Also, Chrono Trigger.

Call of Duty Sweet 16 DS: Barbies in Arms

Honestly, if some of you would just read the article from the view point that it was written by a sensationalist trash newspaper you'd be able to figure out what actually happened. Sony bought a dead goat from a butcher in Greece and decapitated it for effect. I don't think it was particularly tasteful but it's certainly not what the Daily Mail are implying it was. If you can't see that when you read the article then you're the sort of reader the Daily Mail aims themselves at and believe me that that isn't something to be proud of.

Well I donwloaded it and was quite surprised. If you're into the whole idea of compeleting a level as fast and expertly as possible then there's a lot here. The levels are quite easy to complete, even getting gold is easy first time on many of them, but the leaderboards are where the fun lies. I set a few world record times earlier, and I'm sure they've all been beaten since then so I'm looking forward to going back later to try and improve my times. Trying to find the perfect route through the levels is fun, and even if it's obvious a lot of the time the designs are good enough on many levels to make you want to keep advancing up the leaderboards.

I think we need to differentiate between what this article refers to as a random battle and what some commentors are interpreting as a random battle. The article is talking about a random battle system as defined by most Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games. In such a system the battle mode and the adventure mode are seperate. Enemies do not appear in general in the adventure mode and battles randomly occur after a certain number of steps. The game then switches to battle mode and presents a semi random set of enemies.
This is different to the idea of encounters being random, which is to say it is not predetermined what set of battles you engage in over the course of the game. Lots of games don't use a random battle system but do still have random encounters. They just display the enemies on screen in adventure mode and you can avoid them if you like. Final Fantasy XII does this very well for example.
In my opinion having enemies on screen in adventure mode is the only way to go forward anymore. It feels too disjointed to go back to the whole random battle thing after playing a lot of very good games that don't use this system. It's funny to think that Chrono Trigger did this so well such a long time ago and still the majority of Japanese RPGs kept using the random battle system. I suspect now that the system has changed in Final Fantasy XII the majority of other RPGs will follow suit since it's such a high profile title.

Yeah, are the classifying Ireland as being part or the UK or are they just giving us the shaft altogether? Either way it's pretty insulting for a nation that has so many gamers relative to it's population size.

@177: You're right that it's to be taken with a pinch of salt, but it does sound like it could be true. They've updated the article with a response from the managing editor of MCV and she seems to be very certain of the story. They've also added comments from David Yarnton and some developer views on the article.

Lol, guys it looks like it's all worked out in the end:
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=145753
This is European info, but I'm sure it won't be too different in the US. November 24th is a bit further off than expected, but what can you do?

For all those people who say $30 doesn't matter because you've already spent $600 on your PS3 and quite a bit more on a 1080p tv, I think you're missing the point. $30 is still money, it's money that Sony is saving themselves by not including the cable while still charging $600 for the machine. They've blew so much smoke up our asses about how future-proof the machine is, and yet they wont include a cable to allow us to take advantage of all this future-proofing. And the way they've tried to justify the $600 price point is because it's future-proof. I mean it's just stupid when you think about it. Just because an extra $30 doesn't mean a lot relative to the overall cost doesn't mean it's okay to have to pay it.