I always liked “clearly no-one important, because no, I don’t”

I went on holiday with my family to Italy in 1998. We stayed in a lovely hotel with its own restaurant that we’d eat in every night as part of the package. The food was spectacular and the servers were all cheerful, friendly, impeccably trained, clearly enjoyed what they did and took pride in doing it well.

What gets me is that her expression doesn’t change. There’s no sense of effort or exertion. It’s exactly the same problem there was with the cgi Keanu fighting the Agent Smiths.

I have no idea how many hours my best friend and I spent playing co-op Perfect Dark on the N64. Even Carrington Villa. Seriously, people playing co-op don’t care about 60 fps...

Unfair to go against shielded, but I remember hearing somewhere (probably TIE Fighter itself, actually) that the Empire wouldn’t even enter an engagement unless they outnumbered the opposition 3 to 1. Shields are only so good when you’re being shot at from twelve directions at once.

Still is mine. 20 years and counting.

“You can’t go through that door”

When I first heard about Steam machines I thought they’d be something similar to a modular smartphone - you buy the Steam box, with set amounts of Ram, set graphics card, set hard drive etc. Then the next year they’d release ‘steam box 2’, alongside ‘steamRAM 2’ and ‘graphics card 2’, so if you’d bought the first box…

You succeeded!

That was genuinely the best Rockstar editor film I’ve seen. You kept it simple and kept the focus away from characters, which worked really well. Often when you see Rockstar editor films the creators try to be too ambitious or try to get the characters to ‘act’, which is where the limitations of the animations become…

I remember around 2007 when Devil May Cry 4 was announced on 360 that people were terrified about Sony loosing the last of the ‘big two’ exclusives - Metal Gear and Final Fantasy, and how if that happened it would sign their death warrant. How times change!

This is my main thing - I love games. Sure, I have preferences (my first console was a NES, Nintendo will always have a special place in my heart), but because I love games I want to play good ones. The console doesn’t matter. The publisher doesn’t matter. The developer does matter, because again, I have my…

Sadly you’re wasting your breath. I’ve had arguments with staunch pre-orderers here before, you can point out how they’re defending the publishers instead of themselves as consumers and the industry as a whole and they just won’t listen. The best response you’re likely to get is ‘I’ll do what I want with my money’ and…

Inadvertent rudeness! That’s amazing! I remember when I first found out about phonemes and how the language centre of the brain basically locks off at such a young age (I thought 2-3 years, but another poster linked me to a paper that suggests it can start as young as 6 months!) I found it mind-blowing that there was…

That was interesting. I thought the cut-off point was 2-3 years, I didn’t realise it could be as short as six months!

We do. I thought you were talking about when a Japanese person speaks English and confuses ‘R’ and ‘L’ (the ‘chicken flied lice’ stereotype), but I see you were more referring to loan words, which makes sense of your other comments here about English speakers trying to pronounce foreign loan words correctly. The only…

It’s much like the Queen’s Guard. Tourists love their silly big hats and how they never smile and see them as some quaint olde English tradition, but they’re amongst the best of the best.

Sadly there are a vast number of people who genuinely see no problem with not washing their hands after they’ve gone to the toilet, because they’re ‘clean’ or ‘have a shower every day’. Trying to get them to understand otherwise can be a painful experience.

Also, L is nothing like R, mkay?