Now I remember!! It's snow!! About five inches of it, which isn't a lot by some standards but in southern Oklahoma it only slows like this about once every 2-3 years.

And no I'm not talking about the genre of music. ;)

Clicky

Shut up.

Shut up!

YES, I know I'm the only person in the northern hemisphere who hasn't beaten Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker! I stopped playing and now I've decided to finally finish it. Yes, it's been a while, but if we dwell on each others faults we'll be here all day, so let's move on.

What I need assistance with is the Triforce shards. I've found 7 of them, and according to my chart, the final chart lies within that mysterious ghost ship. I've shot my cannon at it, swam up to it, hit it with the Hookshot, thrown my boomerang at it. I even tried to control a seagull...then I realized there are no gulls at night. Nothing works and everything goes right through it.

So I now turn to the helpful denizens of TendoCity.

How do I get that damned chart? Anyone who tells me to go to GameFAQs or buy a strategy guide need not reply, I will not reduce myself to that.

Hope for an answer soon, I'm eager to continue my quest.

Oooh boy is this fun! The vehicles are an AWESOME addition to the game. :D It really puts UT2K4 up to par with Halo.

My first impression was that UT2k4 looks more classic or dated in comparison to UT2K3. I did notice how control seems much more fluid in 2K4, which I really like. The demo Deathmatch and Capture the Flag maps aren't very exciting, but the new Assault and Onslaught modes are very interesting. :D I especially like the vehicles in Onslaught. It's some very cool stuff.

There's also the addition of online communicating via a microphone, which I have not tried yet, plus a pleathera of other cool new things here and there. Worth the 209MB download. :)

I'm sure we have a thread. I just forget where it is. Too far back. :)

PC and X-Box; I think this is X-Box shots.

Preview
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/starwa...89361.html

News, a few new things here too
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/starwa...89351.html

Here are two NYT opinion pieces...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/13/opinion/13HERB.html

Quote:Bush's Duty, and Privilege
By BOB HERBERT

Published: February 13, 2004

James Moore, an author and former Texas television reporter who has spent many years following the fortunes of George W. Bush, often tells the story of a gifted high school athlete from Flint, Mich., named Roy Dukes.

"I ran track against him," Mr. Moore said. "He went to Flint Southwestern High School, and he was amazing."

That was back in the late 1960's. When Roy Dukes strode onto the track for an event, said Mr. Moore, he drew everyone's attention, especially other athletes'. "They stopped their warm-ups or whatever they were doing to watch him because he was just phenomenal."

Mr. Moore lost track of Mr. Dukes for a couple of years. "And then I come home from college one weekend and I open up the paper and there's Roy's picture. He was killed in Vietnam. I was just flabbergasted."

Mr. Moore explores the murky circumstances surrounding President Bush's service in the National Guard in the late 60's and early 70's in a book that is soon to be published called "Bush's War for Re-election." This issue remains pertinent because it foreshadowed Mr. Bush's behavior as a politician and officeholder: the lack of engagement, the irresponsibility, and the casual and blatantly unfair exploitation of rank and privilege.

Mr. Bush favored the war in Vietnam, but he had the necessary clout to ensure that he wouldn't have to serve there. He entered the Texas Air National Guard at the height of the war in 1968 by leaping ahead of 500 other applicants who were on a waiting list.

Mr. Bush was eventually assigned to the 147th Fighter Group (later to become part of the 111th Fighter Interceptor Group), which Mr. Moore described in his book as a "champagne" outfit. "The ranks," he said, "were filled with the progeny of the wealthy and politically influential."

So here's the thing: After strolling to the head of the line, and putting the Guard to the considerable expense of training him as a pilot, Lieutenant Bush didn't even bother to take his duties seriously. He breezed off to Alabama to work on a political campaign. He never showed up as required to take his annual flight physical in 1972, and because of that was suspended from flying.

This cavalier treatment of his duties as a Guardsman occurred as thousands of others were being killed and wounded in Vietnam — youngsters of great promise like Roy Dukes, who was 20 when he died. Having escaped the horror of the war himself, one might have expected Lieutenant Bush to at least take his duties in the National Guard seriously.

Now, more than three decades later, there are questions about the seriousness of Mr. Bush's stewardship as president. He has certainly been profligate with the people's money, pushing through his reckless tax cuts and running up a mountain range of deficits that extends as far as the eye can see.

Citing phantom weapons of mass destruction, he led the nation into a war of choice that has resulted so far in the tragic deaths of more than 500 American troops and thousands of innocent Iraqis, and the wounding of thousands upon thousands of others. Like Mr. Bush during Vietnam, privileged Americans have had the luxury of favoring the madness in Iraq without having to worry about fighting and dying there. If the sons and daughters of the wealthy and powerful were in danger of being sent to Iraq, the U.S. wouldn't be there.

Neither Congress nor the American people are being told in a timely way how much this war is costing. But powerfully connected corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel have been kept deep inside the loop and favored with lucrative no-bid contracts for their services.

Mr. Bush has been nothing if not consistent. He has always been about the privileged few. And that's an attitude that flies in the face of the basic precepts of an egalitarian society. It's an attitude that fosters, that celebrates, unfairness and injustice.

More than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam, another war of choice that was marketed deceitfully to the American people.

Mr. Bush's experience in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam years is especially relevant today because it throws a brighter spotlight on who he really is. He has walked a charmed road, with others paying the price of his journey, every step of the way.

Quote:The Real Man
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: February 13, 2004

To understand why questions about George Bush's time in the National Guard are legitimate, all you have to do is look at the federal budget published last week. No, not the lies, damned lies and statistics — the pictures.

By my count, this year's budget contains 27 glossy photos of Mr. Bush. We see the president in front of a giant American flag, in front of the Washington Monument, comforting an elderly woman in a wheelchair, helping a small child with his reading assignment, building a trail through the wilderness and, of course, eating turkey with the troops in Iraq. Somehow the art director neglected to include a photo of the president swimming across the Yangtze River.

It was not ever thus. Bill Clinton's budgets were illustrated with tables and charts, not with worshipful photos of the president being presidential.

The issue here goes beyond using the Government Printing Office to publish campaign brochures. In this budget, as in almost everything it does, the Bush administration tries to blur the line between reverence for the office of president and reverence for the person who currently holds that office.

Operation Flight Suit was only slightly more over the top than other Bush photo-ops, like the carefully staged picture that placed Mr. Bush's head in line with the stone faces on Mount Rushmore. The goal is to suggest that it's unpatriotic to criticize the president, and to use his heroic image to block any substantive discussion of his policies.

In fact, those 27 photos grace one of the four most dishonest budgets in the nation's history — the other three are the budgets released in 2001, 2002 and 2003. Just to give you a taste: remember how last year's budget contained no money for postwar Iraq — and how administration officials waited until after the tax cut had been passed to mention the small matter of $87 billion in extra costs? Well, they've done it again: earlier this week the Army's chief of staff testified that the Iraq funds in the budget would cover expenses only through September.

But when administration officials are challenged about the blatant deceptions in their budgets — or, for that matter, about the use of prewar intelligence — their response, almost always, is to fall back on the president's character. How dare you question Mr. Bush's honesty, they ask, when he is a man of such unimpeachable integrity? And that leaves critics with no choice: they must point out that the man inside the flight suit bears little resemblance to the official image.

There is, as far as I can tell, no positive evidence that Mr. Bush is a man of exceptional uprightness. When has he even accepted responsibility for something that went wrong? On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that he is willing to cut corners when it's to his personal advantage. His business career was full of questionable deals, and whatever the full truth about his National Guard service, it was certainly not glorious.

Old history, you may say, and irrelevant to the present. And perhaps that would be true if Mr. Bush was prepared to come clean about his past. Instead, he remains evasive. On "Meet the Press" he promised to release all his records — and promptly broke that promise.

I don't know what he's hiding. But I do think he has forfeited any right to cite his character to turn away charges that his administration is lying about its policies. And that is the point: Mr. Bush may not be a particularly bad man, but he isn't the paragon his handlers portray.

Some of his critics hope that the AWOL issue will demolish the Bush myth, all at once. They're probably too optimistic — if it were that easy, the tale of Harken Energy would have already done the trick. The sad truth is that people who have been taken in by a cult of personality — a group that in this case includes a good fraction of the American people, and a considerably higher fraction of the punditocracy — are very reluctant to give up their illusions. If nothing else, that would mean admitting that they had been played for fools.

Still, we may be on our way to an election in which Mr. Bush is judged on his record, not his legend. And that, of course, is what the White House fears.

http://game-science.com/news/000406.html

Quote: 12:02
Today's Nikkei Newspaper includes a discussion with Nintendo's Yamauchi, as well as an interview with the president of the company, Iwata.

Iwata:
(about the GC)
- The main reason for GC's surge in sales at the end of the year was the price cut
- I heard we even managed to surpass Sony's sales in the US for a moment
- In Europe too, we were up on the previous year
- We have been able to provide proof positive that the GC is not a dying platform
- We were looking for the right time to drop the price from early 2003

(medium term targets)
- Today's games are complex and take time to produce - the age where we would struggle with graphics and memory is over
- How can we expand the industry - the Nintendo DS is one way we are trying to do so
- Yamauchi has the genius perception to see the customers' trends
- I am thinking more from a scientific viewpoint of what we can do to achieve this

(about the next generation)
- I don't think our problems can be solved by just increasing the power of the consoles
- It's not clear what other companies are trying to achieve with their new consoles, we will not make something incomplete just for the sake of it
- Nintendo's hardware development team is thinking about when we should release the next machine

(about online games)
- I wonder how much money companies like Sony and Microsoft are making from this?
- You can't say that appropriate business models are in place yet - customers are also not jumping on board
- But Nintendo doesn't hold a negative view of "net technologies"
- For example, we're thinking about new forms of play using wireless communication

Yamauchi:
- Because of other companies' pricing policies, we had no choice but to cut the price of the GC
- I think the game industry is maturing in different ways to those I imagined
- The industry is displaying certains aspects of being in a crisis
- Gamers don't just want beautiful graphics, sounds and epic stories
- We cannot guarantee interesting and fun games just by using better technology and increasing the functions of the machines
- But makers have plenty of money, so they won't stop making that kind of game
- The truth is, I thought about the idea for DS about 18 months ago
- We plan to show the successor to the GC at next year's E3, even though typical gamers aren't demanding high specs. The people who call it the "next generation" are people who don't know games
- The management are expecting good things from the DS
- If we can increase the scope of the industry, we can re-energise the global market and lift Japan out of depression - that is Nintendo's mission
- If the DS succeeds, we will rise to heaven, but if it fails we will sink to hell
- The next two years will decide Nintendo's fate
- Dual screen games is my final suggestion
- From now on, I won't interrupt management flow, though I can still ask for their strength.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3485545.stm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/35564.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/35547.html

Quote:Resident Evil 4 will no longer use the fixed camera system that has been used in the past. Instead you will now play in one of three views, two of which are over the shoulder 3rd person views, and one of which is actually a first person view. At this time we do not know if the game characters can move in first person mode, or just shoot a la Metal Gear Solid 2. In what appears to be a first for videogames, the game will require a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio for the entire game. This makes the game best suited for HDTV’s and supports 480 progressive scan. Those with the 4:3 aspect ratio televisions are not out of luck. If your TV is not widescreen ready, you will simply play the game in letterbox with black bars on the bottom and top of the screen. The reason for this cinematic view comes by way of the 3rd person camera. The main character Leon evidentially takes up most of the left side of the screen, while the right side shows more of the environment. The special angles are said to give a FPS feeling to the game.

The graphics in the game will also be entirely in real time, with no pre-rendered backdrops, no door animations, and no FMV’s. The levels will be wide open and feature very few load times, but tons of zombie like villagers, who are said to be in a trance like state.

The much-revered and hated control scheme seems to still be intact in RE4. However, “the new views make it feel like an entirely different game.” Despite the unchanged controls, the hub will be slightly different with both health ammo making their way on to the screen.

The post also mentions some story spoilers, so if you don’t want to know, don’t continue reading. Resident Evil 4 takes place 6 years after RE2 in the year 2004. Leon, the main character is hired to protect the President's daughter. Unfortunately for her she is kidnapped and taken to South America where Leon then must dispose of swarms of villagers to save the her. The enemies in RE4 are said to react to specific body damage (think Eternal Darkness), throw sharp objects, and are smart enough to even lead you into ambushes.

I will eat your babbies!