Chris

Oh wait, I replied to the wrong person. My claim of complete wrongness was in error!

No, you were completely wrong.

Also, unfortunately, nobody works at Looking Glass anymore. It's weird that the BioWare guy just went along with that, haha.

The reason, as I recall, was that we were making this in the E3 press room and had no access to a real Word processor, so I just quickly mocked the document up in Notepad with HTML. Since we were printing it out straight from the webpage, any web-resolution jpeg (or whatever other format) would look horribly low-res on paper, so I took the original high-res bitmap and scaled it down in the HTML. It totally worked! Then we printed out hundreds of them and put them all over the place and some other website made fun of it and then we ended up having beer and pizza with them.

Yeah, that works for me. It's always tough organizing transatlantic games but if people in the UK are fine with that time, it seems good.

I'm using and enjoying a Microsoft Sidewinder Mouse, but I've never been a discerning enough mouse user to know how it stacks up to other high-quality mouseses.

I'd like to get into the Last Stand mode. I played a ton of the regular multiplayer when the game came out, but I've only played one or two games of Last Stand. I just don't enjoy matchmade multiplayer, but I'd be down to play with some Thumbs.

Not having read the review, I think it's still pretty clear what he means is that movies don't get a free pass for shitty writing, but games do. Movies with poor writing can still be successful, but they aren't very likely to be held up as fine examples of their form.

As far as I recall, we weren't milking "horse bag" or "baboo." "Horse bag" was entirely incidental to the humor of a man listening to our podcast with his apparently-young daughter, and it would have been ridiculous to not read such a surprising email simply because it contains an old reference. Same goes for "baboo" -- I don't know how anyone could have resisted using that GFW clip when it represented such a ludicrously improbable coincidence. You weren't supposed to laugh simply because the words "baboo" or "horse bag" appeared. Also, did Goldblum even actually come up? If it did, I can't imagine it was more than about two second's worth. Sorry to be defensive about it, but this episode absolutely did not feel like an old-reference-laden yuckfest to me. We've done those before, and I've been the one to edit them, so I feel like I would have noticed.

Yeah, but the poem is still "Inferno" by Dante, and we do mention the other parts (to imply EA won't use those names).

Yeah it was fun times!

The front page now contains an additional clue

Welcome, dudes!

I just finished System Shock 2, after first playing the thing years ago and never completing it. Lame ending, awesome experience otherwise. I played it in its original form, without any texture or gameplay mods, and I didn't feel like I was ever overly conscious of its age from a technical standpoint. It's totally understandable why these kinds of intricate, unwieldy mechanics have fallen out of favor in modern game design, particularly in action games, and I don't know if they're necessarily better than the streamlined form they take in similar games like BioShock, but there is something really rewarding about having so much control over your character, mastering such an involved system over the course of a dozen or more hours. Also goddamn what an amazing story structure. Anyway, awesome game.

Welcome, dudes!

Yeah, that's the one I mean. Obviously it still does lose something without the actual editorial comments, which I guess were only published in the magazine.

The reason I liked the PC Gamer list is that it seemed to put forth an implied argument as to the nature and purpose of PC gaming. I don't really care so much about the actual claim "This is objectively the 7th best game ever released on the PC" or whatever, and I doubt they cared that much either. It was the overall palette and some various placements I found interesting. For example, putting Half-Life 2 at #2 followed by Deus Ex as #1 was to me almost a statement in itself. They are paragons of two very different design attitudes, both with strong PC heritage: The thoughtful but very authorially crafted first-person experience, and the involved, player-driven, almost arcane action/RPG hybrid. They're both held up as superlatives of the platform and their genres, but when you're trying to exemplify the PC as a platform, top honors go to the latter. I personally don't agree with Half-Life 2 being the second-best PC game of all time--it's not even the best Half-Life game as far as I'm concerned. But I think it's a great choice in the context of this list. And then Team Fortress at #3. That's it's perfect, if you're trying to illustrate what PC gaming is about. That's yet another exemplar of the medium: the constantly-evolving multiplayer experience that is almost single-handedly demonstrating the full potential of games-as-service within the hardcore sphere. Also in the top 10 are Half-Life, Rome: Total War, Oblivion, Fallout, Thief II, Planescape: Torment, and Fallout 3. All very different from one another, all great games as well as excellent ambassadors for specific strengths of PC gaming. I just feel it was a very illustrative list. It made me think a lot about the PC as a platform and why I like it, and it felt like it was compiled very thoughtfully, rather than as an attempt to just get everyone's favorites in there.

That hypothetical, exaggerated cover actually looks materially closer in spirit to Moby Dick than the Dante's Inferno game does to the Divine Comedy.

It's definitely true that PC games don't have to undergo certification (at least from platform holders), and in many cases that can leave them a bit less stable than their console counterparts. But, while this doesn't make it any better when you're in the heat of the moment getting fucked by a bug, remember that the lack of that certification is what makes the PC the PC, and what makes it so important. The computer is the ONLY gaming device with any kind of real market penetration that doesn't require consent from some large multinational corporation to develop and sell a game. Some people understandably don't care about that kind of thing, because there's obviously no shortage of great games on consoles. But it's really important that people keep supporting the PC, because it would be really shameful if games were the only major entertainment form whose only routes not just to market but even to creation were through closed, proprietary systems.

It's true.

To be fair, that VTOL thing has nothing to do with PCs. There have been a million shittastical flying sequences in GTA and all sorts of other console games. Same with auto-saves right before death. Nothing to do with host hardware, it's purely a game logic issue. The STALKER games are legendarily buggy. It indeed sucks. The tradeoff is that it would be very difficult to actually get those games published on consoles in the first place. I totally share your pain--gaming is a huge headache sometimes, and PC gaming even moreso, so I don't mean to diminish the frustration of your troubles. Many of them aren't necessarily PC-specific though.

It doesn't entirely coincide with my opinion, but it seemed very well justified and interesting to me. There were a lot of games on there I wouldn't have thought of, and some I hadn't even heard of, and some I flat-out disagreed with, but it felt like a list that had a point in existing, and conveyed an interesting snapshot of PC gaming.

The Top 100 in the February issue of US PC Gamer (I think it might be the same list as the UK PC Gamer, since the two staffs collaborated) is actually really excellent. I was surprised by how on-target it was, and how good the writeups were.

I've never seen it

After having read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum last year, I'm reading his The Island of the Day Before. It's definitely the slowest-going of his that I've read so far. He has a tendency to take a while to really settle into the main plot of the story, and since this book jumps back and forth between two time periods, it almost seems to take twice as long. But his command of prose and sense of historical setting remains pretty amazing, so I'm enjoying it nonetheless. It seems like I'm actually getting into the meat of it at this point.