In regards to Star Wars, I remember watching the behind the scenes documentary on the Phantom Menace DVD where you get to see them auditioning child actors for the part of Anakin.

Specifically, you watch them screen test the final three kids, one of which is obviously Jake Lloyd.

In my opinion he was second place of the three, I could never understand why George chose him.

I’ve been very picky about music players over the years. Basically for decades (well, maybe not that long) it was PowerAmp, ever since I had my HTC Hero on Android 1.5.

Then when I got into the whole Open Source thing, I chose Musicolet and loved it, even donated to the author.

Sadly, on my latest phone which seems to have incredibly strict memory/power settings, I had to stop using Musicolet. The phone would kill the player a sing or two into listening no matter what tricks I would use to try and stop it happening.

Now I’m using Phocid which has never been killed while in use.

And I keep all my music in finders, correctly named and tagged with MP3Tag and MusicBee because, you know, Autism. 😁

I don’t think I entirely understood what the hell was going on in Control but I really enjoyed playing it. The way they integrated Alan Wake into the story was brilliant.

Hopefully, this will be just as much fun to play and maybe even understand… 🤣

The only one that I unsubbed to pretty fast was the 8bit guy. I generally enjoyed his videos and then in one of them, he had a fairly rare IBM PC and for some reason, he sticks a screwdriver into the power supply and blows a component.

But what really turned me off was when footage of him turned up on Reddit, taken by himself, of shopping in a place like Costco with his assault rifle on his back. I think he was taking pleasure in scaring some of the customers too.

(I think I’ve remembered that correctly)

Anyway, never went back to his channel after that.

EDIT: I found this Reddit page where someone asked what he did. Didn’t realise that was 5 years ago now!

For my image manipulation, I use paint.net. I’ve tried other free open source stuff but can’t get on with them. I’ll gladly give this one a go! Thanks for posting.

Didn’t Blu-ray win because it was basically neck and neck with the amount of studios backing HD-DVD vs Blu-ray. I think everyone was waiting to see what the final studio would pick (off the top of my head it was either Fox or Warner Bros).

Sony paid said studio basically a massive multi $m bribe to pick Blu-ray (to help promote their new console, the Playstation 3) which they duly did and that format was declared the winner.

HD-DVD would’ve been great as the winner as the specifications don’t include any form of region protection. But blurays hold more data and therefore allows for better quality encodes.

I loved my many Xbox360s! Either the build quality was poor or I was just very unlucky.

I went through at least five machines I think. It started on day one where I got home and started playing Just Cause 2 but the machine kept locking up after 20 minutes of playing.

Two machines suffered from the red ring of death and another had the DVD drive go bad.

However, I have great memories of playing Battlefield Bad Company 2, especially when I got my 5.1 surround sound system.

Was that the game that also had the Vietnam DLC? Love that too.

I used to use this app a lot but I found it started to work less and less. If you follow the right links, there is talk of a new version 3 of the app but I don’t know if that’s still being worked on.

I find that redlib is more reliable for Reddit browsing. It does stop working occasionally but only for a few hours usually.

I think I had to Google that one back in the day. The simple one that got me was when the commander guy says the codec for contacting that certain character is on the back of the case.

What case? I can’t see a case? I’m not carrying a case? God knows how long it was before I found out they meant on the back of the actual PS1 box the game comes in. I can’t remember if they ported that over to the GameCube version.

It’s there a GameCube in there somewhere? That would be pointless surely because of the Wii? In fact, why not included the WiiU instead? Three consoles in one! 😂

In terms of modern games, both of the Last of Us games and Alien: Isolation. I’m sure there’s loads of old games but my memory is awful.

Your comment has reminded me of Eternal Darkness on the GameCube. That did various things like lower the volume with a fake on screen TV display. That didn’t work for me because it was different to my own on screen TV graphics.

But when they faked that my memory card was corrupt and the save was gone, that one got me. 😂

There’s something tricky about converting pdf to epub that I can never get to work properly. Maybe it’s too do with the way the pdf is put together?

I could highlight the text of the pdf and paste it into a document but it would come out different in places. I tried this experiment because the calibre conversion was doing the same thing.

I tried many online converters but none of them could do it either. In the end, I read the converted epub and just had to mentally correct the words that didn’t properly convert.

I don’t remember Blue Burst but I remember setting up my Dreamcast to dial in to my ISP at the time, Demon Internet. Then loading up Phantasy Star Online. Probably the only MMO I really got into. I even purchased the official Dreamcast keyboard to use with it.

I think the only item that interested me was that I can play Alan Wake 2 next month for “free”.

There are several games that come to mind.

Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings was due to be released on mutiple consoles but the leaders were the Xbox360/PS3 versions.

One of the selling points was a unique ragdoll system which meant when you punched a bad guy, there was no set animation of them falling down. The ragdoll physics did it’s job.

There were several videos released during production, usually at E3 shows.

Sadly, the delays keeper getting longer. While there was no official release date, we wondered if they would tie it on to the release of Crystal Skull. The film came and went both theatrically and on home formats but no game.

Then one day, the first official trailer was released, I watched it with excitement. Then the gut punch, at the end of the trailer, it only had logos for PSP, Wii and DS.

Soon after, we learnt the game was cancelled. Some early rough gameplay footage is online.

Another is Star Wars: 1313. The game would tell the story of how Boba Fett became the famous bounty hunter and acquire the armour. This E3 trailer got me so excited.

I think the game was cancelled when Disney bought Lucasfilm.

Finally Star Wars: Rogue Leaders.

Essentially, the two Rogue Leader games from the GameCube remastered for the Wii.

According to an interview, this would have been pushing the Wii to it’s graphical limits, I think they mentioned 60fps.

There was also extra Wii enhancements such as lightsabre battles with Wii MotionPlus remotes and even using the Balance Board as part of ship controls.

If I remember rightly, the game was fully finished but they couldn’t find an interested publisher. He’s the trailer.

I wouldn’t call it a bad change, quite the opposite but when I read Fight Club, I was amazed how faithful the film was to the book. There are just two major changes I can remember.

In the book, Tyler Durden meets the narrator on a (nude?) beach where Tyler is erecting driftwood into the sand so that the shadow looks like a hand. (It’s been a very long time since I read it, I think that’s right.)

Secondly, the narrator struggles all through the story to remember the correct formula for the home made explosive. If he doesn’t know, then Tyler doesn’t know. Which means the explosives at the end don’t go off. The buildings stay standing.

From what I remember, 1984’s Dune is basically the book condensed down into the highlights. If you’ve read the book, fine but otherwise, it must be quite confusing.

I think the term life hack is ridiculous in itself. (Cue old man rant) In my day they were tips and advice. You’re not hacking anything. 😁

I remember getting hold of this game and the typing in the Doom cheat code for invulnerability. it kills you instantly! 😂