Jake

Actually, he's supposed to - in the world of the film at least - be the age he appears in Gollum's cave in the opening prologue to Fellowship. For that scene they actually younged Ian Holm up a bit, with a different wig, some makeup, and actually sort of pulling his face back a bit with some tape or something. It sounded kind of sad and awkward when Ian Holm talked about it in the commentary, but in that one shot of Hobbit-era Bilbo in Gollum's cave, they definitely made him look a bit younger. Ian Holm now looks older even these days he did in Fellowship of the Ring (footage which is nearing a decade old!), so for that to match, they'd have to spend a sad amount of time on him every morning (and it surely wouldn't be comfortable), or do the creepy de-aging-through-computer-effects thing that they did on Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan for the opening of X-Men 3. I imagine that would take a zillion years and also dollars. I'd love to see Ian Holm in the role, since he was a great Bilbo in the films, and the scenes with Bilbo and Gandalf were some of the hilights of Fellowship of the Ring, but there's no way it's going to happen.

Don't be surprised if there's a big "2!!!!" tomorrow, followed by a "1!!!!" the day after, and then a GrumpyGamer.com redesign, or a new flash toon, or something.

I think at this point I've read all the Discworld books, with the exception of the weird spinoff illustrated books and the science ones (thanks to Thumbs staff on both sides of the Atlantic for constantly poking at me about them until I read two or three and then broke down and ordered the first half of the series in an epic Amazon order). This news sort of ruined my week, but it's good to see that Pratchett is taking it so well, or at least is putting forward something other than abject misery. As for where to start... I still sort of thing that people should damn the whole "recommended reading order" charts and crap and start from the beginning, because there is a surprising amount of universe-wide continuity from book to book (eg it's kind of cool to discover the reveal of various nations, or people like the Igor family, or the slow story of the rise of the clacks towers and the golems -- which leads to the industrial revolution/civic improvement series -- at the same time as the main characters in the book, instead of jumping into a story where that aspect of the world has become commonplace), but the complete weirdness of the first few books relative to the rest of the series means that you should probably just cave to the Internet and start with Small Gods or something. The Tiffany Aching books are also great. I think the first couple of those (The Wee Free Men and Hat Full of Sky) are two of Pratchett's best books. The amount of heart he put into those... and also just general awesomeness... is kind of off the charts.

Haven't played Aquaria yet, but the arist on Aquaria, Derek Yu, runs a great great great blog on indie games and gaming called TIGSource ("the independent gaming source"). You can find a zillion awesome games there every week, as well as some great discussion (and some pretentious -- but avoidable, and fortunately discouraged rather than enabled by the mods -- indie snobbery) in their comments and forums. Fun Fact: Derek Yu was on my short list of artists to harass into doing work for Thumbs back in early 2004 when we were starting the site, but I never really made contact with him. This fact makes me more sad with every passing month . Fortunately he's doing awesome things.

Haven't played this yet, but the other Trilby games are all cool and worth playing. Fun fact: When Yahtzee was writing for Adventure Developers I always used to confuse him for Kingzjester, who did some art for that site back when I was helping run it.

Internet superlative: It's the best Mario game since SMW, or possibly SMB3.

An excellent article by an excellent man.

I would love an invite! http://steamcommunity.com/id/ja2ke/

Those are both great! Am I allowed to say that I thought the opening shots of Ahead Of The Game were very reminiscent of the opening to Day of the Tentacle? (Also, apparently one of the guys responsible for DOTT's opening sequence, Ryan Balda, went on to Pixar to do animation work on Monsters, Inc... fun Idle Forums fact of the day)

its true that 3D is overrated

How is that a bad thing? The Zelda controls aren't broke. Does the Wii need real "traditional" games? Yes, and Nintendo delivered a huge one at launch. Now the thread about whether or not there will be traditional games on the Wii is lamenting the fact that Zelda is a traditional game on the Wii. Wait until you play Mario Galaxy. It's ... classic 3D Mario to its very core. The Wii remote is used pretty frequently, but almost never to actually control Mario. Is that bad? No, it's awesome. With the Wii you can have it both ways.

It always amazes me how much faith gamers put in their mind's eye, as you like to call it. I'm so tired of seeing a perfectly passable screenshot for a new game and reading beneath it in the comments "1997 called, it wants its polycount back" or "maybe this is the PlayStation 1 version," forgetting that in 1997 characters heads in fact consisted of like twenty polygons and a 64x64 pixel texture, if you're lucky. I wish more self-titled game aficionados would spend some time to think and maybe learn a bit about how games are (and were) made before comic book guying themselves all over the place.

Given that Ubisoft is porting seemingly every game they've made in the last 3 years to the Wii (after renaming them to make them sound new), and EA has turned the gaze of its flame-wrathed eye from the PS3 to the Wii as well, I don't think there's going to be a lack of traditional console games on the platform. Plus on the first party front Nintendo has things like Super Paper Mario, Smash Bros Brawl, Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3, etc etc all on the way. So my answer is "yes the Wii does need *real games,* and yes it will get a fuckton of them, so don't worry!" As for the Zelda controls, I don't think they're "tacked on" so much as "they ran out of buttons on the remote, and realized that a limited gesture system worked just fine, so they killed two birds with one stone." There might be a bit of tacking on there, but I think the solution the developers came up with was a good compromise, and requires no more or less a learning curve or complex/nuanced control setup than the Gamecube version would. (and that's good enough for me) Also, personally, I'm glad that I don't have to do a forward jab, vertical swing, etc etc gestures with my hand to get Link to do that move. The small flick of the wrist is a nice representational iconic gesture, but it's good that that's as far as you have to go, and can modify it on top of that with buttons. I want to know that my sword swings are doing what I want, and not leave it up to chance that when I really want to do a forward stab motion, the game might misinterpret my contorted wrist as a vertical slice or spin attack. Like in Wii Sports Baseball, I'm really glad you don't have to start from some crazy twisted wrist position and uncurl your hand to throw a curve. If that was the case, I don't think I'd ever throw a successful curveball.

Stop reading Penny Arcade.

Except that the "more like" thing came and went a year or so ago on the Something Awful forums and other sites of that ilk, and was condemned there possily even more quickly than here. "More like..." as a meme still shows up on SA and Shacknews and NeoGAF, but only fully ironically (or is it facetiously?). Anyway! As has been said a few times over, Thumbs' forum doesn't need some wily thread title schtick to be unique.

Though I'm a bit late in posting this, I might as well point out that the shitty slowdowns people have been experiencing in episodes 2 and 3 have been ifxed in 4 and will be rolled back into 2 and 3 in the near future. There was a memory leak to the max found the wrapping/copy protection software Telltale uses... and uh it really sucked. But it's fixed now so non horrible versions are coming soon.

Time to close the poll.

We put aside the board games for a bit and played some 7 player multiplayer Smooth Moves at game night last night... and that is truly great. Not everyone was into it in the beginning, and people began to tire of it at the end, but there was a good solid maybe hour-long block of multiplayer excellence filled with people getting up, jumping around and waving their arms, sitting down with a rapid controller hand-off, and having a ridiculously good time. As a Nintendo Party Game, I don't think it will have the longevity of Wii Sports, which my friends and I continue to play pretty regularly, but it's a really fun diversion in the meantime.

I would in fact pay for a Doom audio book if it were read by Claude.

That's a lotta people! Welcome blytant, number 1,500! Hail Bly-tant!

I think you're doing it a little more facetiously than many others. That said, when I worked in local newspapers, we used to deliberately write the most retarded headlines possible because it was hilarious, but I doubt most readers caught on, or even noticed. I always imagined that maybe one kid saw them over breakfast and declared them lame, without knowing that he was right. That was my secret hope. There was some new age chiropractic place we had to write a business profile on and we called the article The Road To Wellville, which is a book and movie about a guy deceiving all his customers with a bunch of medical bullshit and near circus antics. And it's still online!

Control it like a third person game and you'll be fine. It basically is a third person game... just all you see of that person is the inside of their helmet and their arm. Also I need to finish Metroid Prime. I put it down after playing it a ton when it first came out, but now every time I try to pick it back up, I have no idea what the fuck is going on, have no idea where I am, and can't remember how anything works, so it goes back on the shelf

This should become a front page sidebar, along with Countdown to Tears.

He had the domain name.

Who cares how it looks? It's a functionality demo!