Marek

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Whenever there's meerkats on National Geographic or Animal Planet I just have to watch. They're fucking comedy. As for monkeys ... way overrated. You said it Chris.

You don't have to worry. The soundtrack is in fact super eclectic and awesome.

I had to re-post it because something was wrong with the poll, shhh.

Err, I dunno? What do you mean? All I'm saying is that there's a real company selling moonland. They got a lot of press with it for a while (CNN, National Geographic, etc.)

If that is what I think it is, it's actually legitimate land ownership.

Sounds good.

A small team at Rockstar has been doing design and pre-production on the first next generation GTA since Vice City was released. I'm going to assume that San Andreas is just meant to be the biggest and most fully-featured GTA game Rockstar can come up with right now using their current technology and essentially the same gameplay, and that it's intended to be the climax in the '3D GTA trilogy'. As for what's next ... I hope and expect Rockstar to come up with new ways to make the city come alive. I'd be glad to see tons of procedural stuff happening that makes the city more convincing. But I can't say I'm sure where the series needs to go in terms of gameplay. I liked having real estate in Vice City, but instead of those being story checkpoints it might be possible to make you feel like you actually control real estate in the city. Adding a tiny hint of Tycoon to the formula might be interesting. It might be fun to have some management choices over your restaurant or club, and a bunch of mini-missions inside the building such as chatting with VIP customers. But honestly ... I don't know how the GTA formula can be significantly altered or improved apart from making it incrementally "bigger & better". What would truly increase the interactivity of the game? I mean, there's things on my wishlist, such as better ways to interact with the characters, but I don't think any improvements are going to dramatically change GTA in the way the transition from 2D to 3D did.

Sorry, but you can't drive cars in San Andreas. They had to take it out to keep a good framerate. Okay, so that's not it... but there has to be a catch somewhere, right? Right??

Although I haven't read PC Gamer UK in a long time (too expensive if you're not in the UK), two of their writers have published some great stuff in the interweb, so I'm inclined to believe they're at least half-decent. I find PC Gamer US intolerable, if only for the high amount of ads. Jees.

I'll play HL2. If I like it, I'll play HL2 again. Then I'll play HL: Source. By then it should be January. Screw everything else.

To answer a question that has since been deleted, I believe Mechner's only role was to approve the game. The story isn't being written by him this time around, but by an agency in LA if I remember correctly.

The holidays are coming, which means we'll once again be getting gang-raped with new releases. To illustrate that point, here are just some of the games that are expected to come out in the next two months: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, The Bard's Tale, Jak 3, Blinx 2, Call of Duty: Finest Hour, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth, The Settlers: Heritage of Kings, Viewtiful Joe 2, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Half-Life 2, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, The Chronicles of Riddick PC version, Unity, Halo 2, Killzone... This really makes you wonder...

I dunno. Ragnar goes all over the world for different reasons I guess. Apparently his NYC trips are work-related. I also know one of his recent more exotic trips was for research purposes, but I don't think that part of Dreamfall has been revealed so I'll shut up about it. I have no idea about China though.

Meet the "new Farah". Hurray for boobies... I guess?

Pfttt, the LucasArts rumor was disproven by us days ago. Except Jake forgot to make it sound like we were actually disproving it and not just guessing. Oh, well. HL2 will eat my soul and spit it out on a plate.

As I said that was just some of the titles, not a definitive list You're right, Fahrenheit and Pirates! are both also really interesting. I don't know much about the other titles mentioned.

Except in reality most of them are interesting.

It's been ages since I last played the original CS. I think I last played it in like 2000 or something, so cs_office might not even have existed then. I know there's two toilets. How do you make them flush? Press "use" key? For some reason my use key is being weird. Like for instance I can open the garage door just fine, but I can't enable the projector, or get bottles from the soda machine.

She writes a bit about DF here. And something called the Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club, which I think is his famous robot workshop. Which rules.

I love that preview. Incidentally it's by the same guy whose GameSpy videos I previously gave the shifty eye, but there's no denying that this guy's writing is really good. At least, it reads a lot better than what GameSpot posted, which was really dry. Edit: what jake said!

Well, I guess it's time for me to quit Idle Thumbs and move on. Cheers guys, it was fun!

I tuned in just a little before the question 'what would you say to someone who's lost his job to oursourcing', and when Bush began with something like "Well I would say Bob..." I thought he'd given the hypothetical man a random name.

I've heard of toilets in cs_office, but where are they?