Macsen

How witty of you, no one's ever done such a joke before. Doesn't it sort of prove my point though? English speakers have a deep seated paranoia about other languages and feel the need to belittle them. They also have a tendency to make up stories about invented weaknesses in other languages - the whole 'spitting Welsh' myth is a good case in point, or 'Welsh has no vowels', or 'my freind walked into a bar and they all started speaking Welsh'. It makes your previous claims about the Chinese language highly dubious. I know the stories about Welsh are rubbish, why should I believe these stories about the Chinese language? But for the record, yes I do prefer the Welsh language. It's completely phonetic, no word has multiple meanings, and its system of mutation for ensuring smooth flow from one word to another is one no language should be without. At the same time it's poetic, full-bodied and full of delighful idioms. It's pretty much the perfect language, really.

Does that light project onto AI and objects too?!

A tall order indeed, given that the 'English-speaking world' has not only been recalcitrant when it comes to learning any other language but also generally demand that countries and people who don't speak English do so. If and when the table turns and they find themselves forced to learn another global language to get by, I shan't feel much sympathy for those who complain that it's too difficult. They should also have a foreign culture imposed upon them, for good measure.

Again, I fail to see how this is any different using our alphabet. As a journalist I have endless conversations along the lines of 'is that Tomas or Thomas, or Tomos?', 'Stephen or Steven?', 'Dylan or Dillon?' (these are just examples within my own family!) - a whole host of surnames are pronounced the same but spelt differently. As for everything depending on context, well that's language for you. Words like rent, awesome, comprise, original, dust, against, cool, dense, fast, to name a few from thousands, have different meanings depending on the context in which they're spoken.

There's a tendency for English speakers to believe our own hype regarding the language and asume it is the best just because it's one of the most widely used, and I can see how it could get on the tits of people who speak other languages. English isn't an easy language by any means, and it is just as confusing for a Chinese person to get his head around English as it is for an English speaker to get his head around Chinese. I wouldn't say any one is better than the other. A Chinese speaker would surely argue that their pictoral alphabet is a quicker way of writing a word rather than having to arrange a bunch of individual letters in a particular order. I don't see how having to learn a few thousand of these pictures, which seem to follow a particular pattern, is any different from the millions of combinations of letters which we have to master to communicate through the medium of written English. I've heard it argued that children in Japan can't understand all their symbols until they're in their teens. But try to find a child who can understand the majority of day to day english words. A lot of words mean several differnt things, and a few have more than one meaning that contradict each other. This doesn't usually occur to a person who's spoken the language all their life, and I'm sure Chinese speakers don't stop to curse the apparent flaws in their language, but just accept it and talk around them.

OrbWeaver, I don't think English is that much better, it just seems so to us because it's our language. How words sound has so little relation to their spelling that they might as well be characters, it's a mad mix of every language on earth, and had another language's grammar festooned upon it. It must be a bit of a nightmare to learn from scratch. I'm a bit distrustful of 'apparently even native speakers sometimes have to simulate writing a character on their hand'. I've heard enough such 'apparently' and 'a friend said' heard about other languages that turn out to be nonsense. And if it's 'an absolute nightmare' to do business in Chinese, it doesn't seem to have stopped their massive boom of growth over the last few years. I agree with oDDity that english is spoken all over the world in part because of the British empire. But the more recent growth is certainly thanks to the globalisation of American culture. And once the same thing happens with Chinese I think we'll see a similar result.

China is slowly moving towards capitalism and democracy of its own accord. At the moment they're going through the industrial revolution x1000 and it's going to take a while for the rust to settle. When this happens they'll be the superpower - atheist, populous, rich, republican, and Mandarin will be spoken all over the world just as English is today. Military intervention at this point would be pointless, would destroy the world economy, and 'we' would lose.

Wow, I didn't know they had DVD-ROM back then. I was told it was all CDs.

Indeed, the Gladiators of the future will all be spotty 200 pound 16 year olds.

It'd be cool to have a mission where you have to steal a cat - but the thief has an allergy to it!!! Cue lots of sneezing at inappropriate moments and alerting guards.

It's sad in a way that, if they'd spent that much time of a sport like tennis, they'd be competing with the best by now. But until Quake 3 becomes an olympic sport their skill and reflexes shall never be recognised. And they'll be fat.

There should certainly be a mission where you steal the wig off the head of a noble and use it to sneak into his palace.

These are great textures Arcturus. I really liked the irregular cobbles and the carpet!

Don't! That's the word that made Redface's face red in the first place. Hulk Smash!

Sorry Dram Czech Republic only came into being in 1993 when you split from Slovakia. Your adopted country is older.

I think our thief should have a moustache. Like a silver horseshoe. It would make it mor realistic that he's able to carry so many weapons. Where does he put them... in the moustache!

It was the ultimate twitchy fps multi player game, and probably the best game ever of that genre. But if you don't enjoy that kind of game there's not much it could do for you. I liked the bouncy trampoline levels.

If it sounds like it would take a long time and isn't really necessary, put it in the Dark Mod box marked 'Things the community can do after release if it really cares about it so god damned much'.

Might as well just use the Doom 3 monsters with different textures for pagan creatures. The many eyed imp looks like some sort of bug beast anyway. They're probably the last priority for the Dark Mod in any case. Given that the pagan missions in all three Thief games were pretty crap. Games always go off the rails when they introduce silly aliens or monsters. Where did those bees come from? Did it just keep them in its pockets or what?

No, sorry. I have no comprehension of the rules of the game but even I can see that you stink at it, whatever it is.

I only watched the highlights and even then the game was boring... Despite their best efforts to inflict the game on us over here I can't really see it take off. We are accustomed to 90 minute games with only one 10 minute break in the middle, not 3 hour games with about 50 commercial breaks, plus waiting for the ref to take his tape measure out after every ten seconds. Rugby shows that you can play a physical game for a good length of time without so many rests and without silly padding. Maybe we should repay the favour and take a international rugby match to an American stadium to remind you how Sport is done (the UK being the inventors and masters of all the best sports of course). I'd have thought the Dolphins would have done well at Wembley given their aquatic species and the amount of rain water on the pitch. They could have swam to the end zone.

I just bought the orangebox. The situation is somewhat ironic given the themes of uprising against oppressive and unfair control which seems to be a theme of most Valve games. But every game seems to work offline for me, apart from Portal, which I had to complete tethered up to the internet so that Steam could monitor my progress in much the same way as the creepy robot in the game that tells you what to do...

Bioshock is a plot driven game so of course it's designed so that people finish it. Games don't have to be a challenge. They can just strive to create an immersive world so that the plot has more of an effect on the player. I'm not convinced that games do this any better than films and books, but Bioshock does make good use of gaming conventions in order to deliver a decent twist. Too bad this happens about 3/4 through the game and the rest is a bit of a bore.

Am I the only one walking around in this game thinking 'all these textures and models would be great for the Dark Mod'. We modded the wrong game! I'm only a few levels in and the strangest thing abut the plot so far is how many scottish and irish people are in there. Apart from a few Germans, almost everyone either has a Mc on their name or has an irish name or accent. Did they all leave for Rapture during the potato famine? I liked the Atlas reference to the works of Ayn Rand.

Very Dark Project, I expected the Lost City to pop up behind a corner. All it needs are a few belchers. The guards look a bit odd when they try to turn their heads and walk at the same time. They sort of stick their arms up as if they're doing some sort of dance. The monkey, maybe.