Chindie

Ah that's a bit harsh, the SNES and N64 were great consoles, and the Gamecube had it's moments. It's only really with the advent of the Playstation that the image of gaming changed and Nintendo started to feel a bit out of the running. Even then they stayed competitive for a few years.

It's a series of mingames. It has a nice, ish, framework for them but a series of minigames it is. I don't think someone who writes about games for a living could possibly argue otherwise. But thanks for letting me know you didn't bother reading anything else I put, it'll make it so much more justifiable for me to skip over your schilling of your employers website.

Back to the old favourites for Israel - bombing a residential building to kill a Hamas leader, unsurprisingly manage to kill a few kids, amongst other residents/bystanders. In fairness they have a rule on when they're allowed to use this kind of strike. Unfortunately the rule amounts to 'whenever the **** we want to, we will'.

In fairness theres nothing to get excited about, even if you reject the idea that in a year it's the poor cousin of the other consoles again. I've seen some footage today and found nothing to set my heart racing. New Super Mario Brothers U is, as Rev says, the same idea that's gotten tired spectacularly fast, and only brings anything new to the table when you go for multiplayer - in which case the person with the Gamepad basically becomes a child minder for other players. Nintendo Land may as well be called Gimmick Land - a series of minigames intended to show off the potential of the Wii U but managing to seemingly pull off at best 2 or 3 genuinely intriguing concepts. And even those do not appear to be anything that you're going to be coming back to a year from now. And Zombi U, whilst a welcome attempt at an adult title, suffers for it's gimmick riddled gameplay it seems to me (constantly fiddling with the gamepad, be it inventory management, scanning the environment, checking maps, etc etc. They've actually turned a problem of the very concept, constantly looking down at the pad, into a vital part of the gameplay, which I guess dependant on your view is either a cynical attempt to make up for a flaw or a smart way of incorporating a quirk of the hardware into the system). The Wiimotes, particularly in multiplayer on these launch titles, are back in force. I don't think anyone thinks that's a good thing. I don't think you can rely much on the 'Pro' controller being utilised heavily either. I think anyone purchasing this console any time soon, indeed I might go so far as to argue inside the next 12-18 months, is making a huge gamble. It's banking on gimmicks again, and I'm not sure theres much that tantalising on the horizon.

I thought the general held belief on the Mayan Doomsday Prophecy was that they actually just didn't bother to make a calendar beyond that date, as theres no evidence to suggest they thought the end was coming then.

Patch for AC3 is coming - the number of bugs and issues it's set to fix is hilarious. There is no way that game was not rushed to release. Sadly the patch won't save the game, the bugs are sloppy but the problems extend well beyond those into basic gameplay problems. I'm genuinely at a loss how the game was rated so highly. Well, without resorting to suspicions of the Doritos and Mountain Dew kind.

Have a tenner on under 8.5.

Depends entirely on whether you enjoy the gunplay. I did, and while it never really changes the shooting gets more frantic at points and remains visceral. The rest of it is basically filler. It ends abruptly and disappointingly but until that point I found it dumb fun broken up with some basic tedium.

Manchester City's home league record is verging on obscene. Loss.

And its worth remembering that the Likud Party has in its charter the assertion that Israel has a right to all the land in the former Palestinian Mandate, right down to the Jordan river, too... Also known as Eretz Yisrael, or Greater Israel. Again, neither side is particularly well off ideologically on that front, and ultimately innocents bear the brunt, Palestinians particularly.

Yes. But talk of 70,000 is nonsense.

Anti-semitism is a hate of Jews. A distaste for Israel (even to the extent that one wouldn't be too upset to see it wiped off the map) isn't anti-semitism. I don't see anything to suggest that anyone in this thread simply hates Jews, and thus the cries of anti-semitism are not accurate. Back on topic, talk of Israel bringing up tens of thousands of troops is posturing - they won't need or have any use for that many even if they decide to sweep Gaza into the sea.

I don't think there's a single anti-semite in this thread.

That reminds me, when I saw Killing Them Softly last week, the screening was fairly empty, myself and a couple of mates, an elderly couple, a middle aged couple and a group of lads. The lads couldn't shut the **** up and one seemed to have a bladder the size of a thimble. The bloke of the middle aged couple turned round once about half hour in and said 'Come on lads'. That didn't work. About 20 minutes later, the bloke, who turned out to be a pretty big bloke, turned around and bellowed 'RIGHT, SHUT THE **** UP!' and I swear 3 of the lads jumped in fright, before realising their balls had vanished into their guts and tried to give a feeble bit of cheek back. I wish I could have shook the blokes hand.

Awol, it's widely accepted that Israel is building on land it has no right to, I'm not sure how you can say otherwise. Unless you claim that Palestine doesn't exist and their is no territory belonging to the Palestinians.

Yes Rev, I agree. My dissertation was about this subject, analysing whether you can describe Israeli actions as state terrorism, so I've looked at a lot of action in the conflict, particularly since the al Aqsa Intifada.

Yes the claim to the land on the basis of the Jews having been there 'since Moses' is not one I'd stake my life on... It's not a particularly good/relevant justification. My surname is Old English, and has it's basis in Worcestershire, I'm off to stake a claim for the rightful home of my ancestors. And once I've got some poor sod's farm, I'll have some of Schleswig. I also don't think anyone is particularly in favour of Hamas (beyond some Muslim nutters). What people do tend to be in favour of, though, is the man on the Gazan street - your average Palestinian, who inside a couple of generations has been squeezed to the periphery and spend their days being treated like shit, then been put to the sword by a state of the art military force. Hamas are rocket polishers. That they have gained any form of authority in Palestine is terrible. Israel's military and it's politicians in power are also rocket polishers. They just happen to be rocket polishers that, on the world stage, commit atrocities with gay abandon - a nation that simply does not give a ****. They're indefensible - they do not attack Hamas, they attack a population, many of whom are innocents. And they continually squeeze that population, when they're not killing them. It's understandable that people don't like that. EDIT - It's worth noting that the modern Israeli state in part at the very least, owes it's existance to terrorism. Whilst under British control, Palestine had small cadres of the Jewish population running round bombing things. Apparently it helps you get your way.

I genuinely laughed out loud when I heard about that Newport polling station. They returned the ballot box empty I don't think I've heard such an enormous apathy and disdain for a vote before. It's a dumb idea and basically represents a lack of a mandate for these idiotic positions being put in place.

It wore thin about 3 games ago. They've been making the same game, arguably, since 2007... You can't even really argue that the plot is driving it along because the plot has been moronic since MW2, if not the first MW game.

It has no water either. Truly the land of god. Eretz Yisrael will come to pass soon enough, it's a recognised founding aim of the Likud Party IIRC, and would make the Palestinian problem go away, or at the very least be scattered to the wind. As for Israel status as bastards of the world, if it's not enough that they believe they can use assassination with impunity, and believe that using a **** missile is the best way to do it in the middle of one of the most overcrowded civilian populations in the world, they've also shot taxi drivers they suspect of being a danger while they had passengers in their vehicle. They don't care about civilian casualities (I would argue they actively want them). They bombed a building containing an Hamas leader, with a 1 tonne munition, successfully killing the man but also killing 16 others, including 11 children, and injuring another 140. Because the building was an apartment building. They've bulldozed the homes of Palestinians they have arrested for various offences, taking no consideration for the fact that in Gaza and the West Bank a house may contain a number of unrelated families, and have even bulldozed homes while people are still in them. They have even done this in cases where a detainee had not even been found guilty. A fairly clear example of collective punishment, thankfully they've come to their senses on that one and stopped the policy. They have a legislated use of torture, including use of sleep deprivation, abrupt forced movement of limbs and joints, dry beating and frog crouching. They've in the past also used proxies for rather more traditional torture techniques - beatings with belts sticks and chair legs, burning with cigarettes, threats of electrocution and rape, under Israeli supervision. They restrict movement of Palestinians using checkpoints, arbitrarily denying access and creating highly tense atmospheres at crossings, described as 'pressure cookers'. They've been a focus of violence - from beatings to seemingly arbitrary shootings (the incidents of this are numerous - from soldiers ordering a driver, the driver doing so, and then having his vehicle fired on killing a passenger, to a group of commuters crossing Burin Mountain following the closure of a road, 2 km from an IDF base, being fired on completely without warning and without posing a threat) and in general represent an absolute derision for the Palestinian population. And what makes all this worse, perhaps, is it that doesn't achieve anything of merit. Killing Hamas leaders doesn't force Hamas to pack it in or weaken the organisation, mounting indiscriminate land invasions of Gaza and the West Bank doesn't make Palestinians less likely to fight back against Israel, and so on. It is all nonsense. They simply want the Palestinians gone, they want Gaza and the West Bank and they don't like the fact that people are already there. Not that they really give a shit because they keep building on that land anyway. **** despicable nation and it is sickening that they're allowed to get away with this again and again. I think only the French could challenge the Israelis for a list of UN reprimands.

The Guy Martin show is How Britain Worked. Its decent but Guy himself grates. I get tempted to throw things when he says 'graft' again and again.

Doing pretty much anything militarily in that region isn't the wisest idea if you give even a second thought for humanity.

That picture is just a mock-up to illustrate a piece in the magazine where they're discussing the potential of Durango. And the article is mostly stabs in the dark that anyone could make, with the odd more out there punt.

We've the had the rocket debate before, around the time of Cast Lead IIRC. It isn't right that Palestine launches them, but response is entirely disproportionate (Palestinian rockets have been fired for donkeys years in the thousands and, as a weapon of war, they've proven pretty shit). In response, Israel launches cutting edge weaponry at civilian areas and, based on previous, eventually rolls out the tanks and appears to not give a **** who gets hurt. I don't think I can ever support assassination, let alone assassination by such indiscriminate means that always (arguably intentionally) hurts innocents in their droves. It's basically terrorism, they attempt to compel the Palestinian population to do as Israel desires by sending the message that they are powerful and will inflict pain on Palestine if they don't. Fear used to bring about political aims... I don't think the UK comparison stands - there's not a real allegory there. To be even close to accurate, you'd have to posit a situation where... say, Wales, was incredibly poor and run down, a Third World country, and the rest of Britain intent on expanding into Wales, forcing the population into smaller and smaller pockets and not really giving a **** what the Welsh think, and when the Welsh threw metaphorical stones at us from, say, Swansea, we retaliated by sending up the RAF and bombing a city with a main aim of killing a resistance leader by with a secondary, unspoken aim of killing a load of Welsh people to send the message 'Behave'. The comparison doesn't work without that additional information - if France hit us their military might for no reason, I'd agree with you. But this isn't France. This is a country that is broken, taking on a state equipped to the highest levels, and with a quite genuine grievances to do so. As much as I don't like Hamas and would like to avoid conflict (I'm not idealistic enough to believe conflict is never justified), I cannot support Israel on this.

Israel seems more interested in giving the Palestinian conflict another stoking, given they've just assassinated some Hamas officials (admittedly a fairly grim one included) in their favourite indiscriminate manner - air strike in the middle of a civilian population. ...My dissertation on Israeli state terrorism is out of date already