Huz

If it's 'opening' at midnight Pacific then that's 8am GMT - just in time for me to get frustrated at the final stages of the download process via Steam, kick my computer into millions of tiny pieces and rush out of the house, probably.

SP2 works fine for me, so it must be flawless! I do use Firefox though.

OK, fine, this game is pretty awesome. Anyone want a game over the interweb?

Or you have the pages' content-type sent as application/octet-stream. IE seems to render pages like that, but Firefox's behaviour is correct.

Well, the 'Run Now' option is just to allow you to add a new filter and then apply it to existing mail automatically - a feature Outlook lacked I think? Once a filter is configured it automatically runs on all new email. I'm subscribed to a few mailing lists and I use filters to sort messages into folders, too. Well, you've noticed that every account has its own filters, right? Can't you set up some kind of filter on the appropriate account that applies to everything? Hope this helps

TabBrowser Extensions is rather bloattastic - and bloated or too numerous extensions do indeed make Firefox take longer to load. If all you want is to force 'new windows' to open as new tabs instead, look around for an extension called 'Single Window' instead - unfortuately it's rather elusive at the moment, as every Firefox upgrade seems to break compatibility with it... one of the more annoying things about Firefox, but hopefully these problems will go away now that it's out of beta. If you think the RSS feature in Firefox rules, have a look at using Thunderbird for your mail - it supports RSS too, and new posts pulled in via RSS appear in a similar form to new email, so you can treat them kinda like newsletters. Awesome!

Er, how doesn't it? Genuine question. :~

Having played the demo now, I agree completely about the ragdolls - I got over being offended pretty quickly and am now just wondering why, man, why? Watching an unconvincing limp human mannequin fly unrealistically through the air is actually less fun than watching your car come to a crunching standstill, I think. So I've gone from being offended by the ragdolls' mere presence to being offended by their pointlessness. They really add nothing to the game, other than perhaps a bit of notoriety and more "omg games are evil" denouncements, and as such are completely unjustifiable. Pffft. Also I might take advantage of Game's 10-day return policy to 'rent' this game... ssh.

Yeah, I must admit I did the same thing. That's why I thought the marketing was focusing solely on the ragdoll stuff, so apologies to Kolzig for the misunderstanding. Even so, Jaero's points still stand.

Lawyers.

Seeing as space is becoming quite a consideration, I'm highly tempted to buy this, just for San Andreas and Ico and that turd-rolling game, if it ever happened to come out in the UK (hint: no). MUST! RESIST! What do games use the hard drive for anyway?

My thoughts exactly, Jaero. This could quite easily have been a game about hurling cars around a track and smashing inanimate objects about, but for no reason the developer has seen fit to make it gratuitously violent instead of just plain fun. Or so it seems. Kolzig, the 'corpse mangling' aspect may well be a small part of the game, but the trailer hardly suggests that, does it? I find it hard to believe that you can't see this. You know how they try to sell movies differently to different audiences? The trailer suggests they are trying to sell this game to fucking loons, which suggests it is aimed at fucking loons and therefore not the kind of game the average non-fucking loon would like to play. Perhaps I'm over-analysing the near 100% human-mashing content of the trailer here, though. Yes, I guess if the trailer didn't exist, it wouldn't seem like the "ragdoll pain and realistic snapped vertebrae effects omg!!!!1" were such a big deal. As it is, it just highlights how the developers have tainted a perfectly good "car game" by making it about the people inside them. Very few "car games" do that, and I don't believe anyone ever thinks of other drivers while tearing around the Indy 500 track backwards in a misguided attempt to cause as much mayhem as possible. Er, possibly unless they're doing it in real life.

Wait, ragdoll drivers? With the trailer entirely devoted to running them over? What the hell? That is not cool. Plus the web site has a massive image of a cassette tape obscuring the text. Screw this game! Also, I am John Kerry.

OK I'm getting it. (Seriously, based on these screenshots alone.)

Hmm, OK. Steam may be like a giant distended rectum, strained out of Valve's overworked arse by the irresistable urge to snub all publishers everywhere, but at least the end result of obtaining HL2 seems like it may be worth the battle. CS Source is clearly brilliant - the little physics touches add more than I imagined, and other little effects like the sight and sound of bullets narrowly missing your head and slamming into the wall behind you add so much to the game it's unreal. It even has the good grace to run acceptably on my lowly machine (1.3GHz, woo), but that's with most settings on 'Medium'. I was expecting a 'mere' graphics overhaul but CS Source is much more than that. It even shows enemy players' names when they're hiding behind objects and you can't actually see them. omg wallhax!!!!11 Bet that gets fixed. One question though - why are people using the office bogs in the middle of a hostage situation? I mean, sure, go in there to avoid simply shitting yourself, but actually flushing is a bit of a giveaway, guys.

Mine too, bre. Mine too.

Preloaded HL2 earlier this week. Bought it earlier today in anticipating of leaping straight into CS: Source, since it's all, you know, preloaded and shit. Guess what's still downloading. Steam is the only gay in the village.

Is PCI Express better than AGP? Hmm.

You are like some kind of awesome informant person to me. I love you! I have a Geforce FX5200 as well, so this sounds encouraging. Kinda. I might miss being able to see an enemy from 300 miles away at 1600x1200 in the original CS, but Jake's description of being able to shoot computers in the office makes it sound worth the sacrifice. Hmm...

Mmm, so now I'm kind of curious to hear how it all runs on a less than cutting edge (ok, shit) computer. Anyone playing it on, just as an example, a 1.3GHz with 512MB RAM and a fairly average graphics card? I should probably find this out for myself, but hey, you're all a resource waiting to be abused tapped.

I am in the process of checking it out. Report - I am amused. Like kinda a bit, and stuff.

I just shot the poor guy in the face, as a reflex. It was great! I mean, in a bad way. The game had got me so wound up that I was just itching to shoot something, and the poor scientist guy just happened to be it. Sorry scientist guy! That'll teach you to hide around corners though.

True. Thanks! Looks awesome, obviously. Looks like some of the in-game shots were suffering from slowdown, which is nasty, but presumably that'll be fixed. And I don't usually watch trailers so maybe this is a common thing.

Looked on Winamp 5's Library feature? There are a few stations for gaming music... I think a few of them are specifically for retro stuff. Maybe.

Rrgrggh. While waiting for Steam to update its shite self, I decided to go and read about HL2. By following a link from Penny Arcade. That counts as in-depth investigation around here. Anyway... It seems that the standard edition of HL2 will ship on six CDs. Six?!/!?/ But guess what - no DVD option available! To get the honour of not having to make six disc swaps during installation, you have to splash out for the Collector's Edition. Or get it via Steam. The latter seems increasingly tempting, even despite the second sentence of this post, but six CDs? What? Why are publishers sticking with the CD format for gargantuan PC games? I'm sure the vast majority of PCs newer than, say, three years old have a DVD-ROM drive, so what's up with wanting to leave us stranded in anachronistic coaster-ville? Soon after the release of UT2004 in Europe, you only had to look at an online retailer that ranked its items, differentiating between the DVD and CD-ROM releases, to see which was clearly more popular. And yet the DVD version wasn't even released in the US, I hear. What? Perhaps publishers are scared of having to spew out two separate versions of their games - though I can't imagine the choice of media being a big issue or anything - but it's seriously a pain in the arse for the poor gamer. Incidentally, Vivendi could really do themselves a favour by making the retail release of HL2 DVD-only, I reckon - which fancy-pants net-savvy broadband user isn't going to have a cheapo DVD-ROM drive in their PC? - otherwise Steam really is the better option. I don't think Vivendi are really that bright though, so maybe I'd better start preloading.