Huz

Won't Blue-Ray drives be backwards compatible with standard DVDs, then? In which case, what difference does it make? HMM?

Looking at the Steam survey, over 75% of 'gamers' have DVD-ROM drives. And you'd think that these 'gamers' who play the original HL are more likely to have less good (read: more crappy) PCs than average PC gamers. In conclusion, publisher HATE. DVDs are the future, mang!

Interesting. My Steam is now grey. It still looks like a horrific accident. I am also supposedly connected to the friends service, but I doubt this will be the state of affairs for very long.

Oh man, you can change the theme? Awesome! Sadly, the grey scheme is almost as ugly as the default turdy one. I use it to play against people I already know. Or rather, I try to. I should be able to say "I'll join a server and you follow on", and the other guy should be able to right-click my name and say "Join game". Of course I can never stay connected so obviously this doesn't actually work. You can also use it to send instant messages to each other while you're playing CS or something. And there are some mini-games in Steam as well (Chess I think) which can be played with people on your friends list, but those take you out of the main game, unfortunately. Playing Chess while dead in CS would be an excellent way to pass the time between rounds, and I usually have a lot of it to pass. FWIW, I am supposedly connected to the Friends service now, but no network connections are showing up in Windows so god knows how it works. Or expects to work through NAT.

Apparently it's been moved to here for no reason.

Hmm, OK, me too. Clearly some shooting in the face of the webmaster is required.

It's only a deathmatch map, but it is super-cool. Grab it here. Get it "on" by typing "map melee3d" at the HL console (or choosing it from the list when you create a LAN server, I think). While I'm pimping out my stuff on certain other forums, I might as well blatantly plug the trailer I made for it. We used to play this map over at MIGC, but er, we don't any more. Boo.

Hehe. It was a poorly constructed sentence anyway - I knew as soon as I typed it but I couldn't be arsed to fix it. Go me! His music is very good (at least Michael Land told him how much he liked it!), but while his 'animutations' aren't really bad, it does seem unfair that he got a lot of recognition (albeit fleeting) for something that was probably more of an accidental success. There, I said the same thing again for no reason. Hmm.

Isn't the Platinum pack HL + OpFor + Blue Shift? Blue Shift isn't supported by Steam (for some reason), which is why you haven't been given that. And you seem to get OpFor for free with a bog-standard HL1 CD key - don't ask me why. Maybe they can't differentiate them from Platinum Pack CD keys or something. Tsk, Valve. Anyway, Counter-Strike, Day Of Defeat, Team Fortress, Half-Life Deathmatch and Ricochet are all multiplayer mods - the first two were formerly indy efforts which have been absorbed by Valve, the others were made by Valve themselves. Have you seen the Melee 3D map for Half-Life? BEST!

For first impressions alone, I think you probably are.

The Friends list still hits me with "You have been signed out due to network maintenance" messages all the time. I presume it's something to do with being behind a NAT router, but as that's not a particularly uncommon situation: Steam = turd

It always annoyed me that he got all that recognition for his 'animutations' and not his music, which actually has the advantage of being very good. (Ooh, get me)

¬ ¬ Incidentally, I would be the master of this Ship game if only I could find a gun, or indeed any weapon at all. Perhaps that's the trick, eh?

2005 now? Muh. The Xbox will cost 5p by then.

Hey, looks interesting. From reading the play guide, it looks like you (as the killer) have to kill as many pre-selected 'victims' as possible without being seen - kind of like an online wink-murder! I've played something similar online in the form of a text-based roleplaying thing (yes, shut up ) and that was great fun (although in that implementation there was only one 'killer' who had the added difficulty of having to hide his victims' bodies, so unless you had lots of players it became pretty obvious whose company everyone seemed to be dying in). I'm downloading it now, yay. Let me know if you want to connect to the same server or something. Also Trep, just install Steam - it'll "remember" you and download HL all by itself! Unless you have dialup or something. In which case, yech. Update - updating Steam platform? I still hate Steam.

See, it's always like that initially. Once you lose the "running into a hail of gunfire without a second thought" play style that you've become so used to thanks to years of Quake and Unreal Tournament and start playing more tactically (yes, usually by cowering in a corner for half the round) it becomes more fun. Really. Incidentally, I'm still absolutely terrible at CS, but at least I appreciate it more than I used to.

Shut up. Apparently there's a problem with the demo and AMD Thunderbirds. They say they're going to reissue the demo though, so woo. Woo.

Mohh. The demo doesn't work on my AMD device. Mohh, mohh, mohh. Theme Park made me weep. I could never get all the cool rides before being crippled by tax or rent or pay-rises or some other such thing. I hate. Theme Park was the sort of game that made me resort to cheats. And cheats are generally bad. Luckily, the demo doesn't work on my PC, so I'm spared this fate. Mohh.

Bah. Down with people who say it's a sci-fi series first. It's a sitcom in a sci-fi setting - hence the absense of Oscar-winning special effects. Listen, you wouldn't call Blackadder a historical costume drama with funny bits, would you?! This paragraph is just me taking pre-emptive action, so if you weren't going to object anyway, it can safely be ignored. Did you know that the Red Dwarf model was eight feet long? That's, like, really long, in metres. Like two! Whoa. It was all big and stuff. But I don't think models count as props. Also, less of the "not so much". It's GREAT! And tabacco instantly became my hero by quoting it in the blurb for his recent Thumbs article. It's THAT good. Really. What were we talking about again? Oh yeah, props. I nominate the communicator bracelets from Blake's 7, because they were just bits of plastic. And hence you can make one yourself and say things like "Bring us up, Vila!" into your wrist and get funny looks. ACE!

I flollop (in a very floopy manner). Also I liked it.

From my brief Google shenanagins, it looks like Re-Volt, of which I have never heard (sorry), uses DirectPlay - in which case you'll have to open shitloads of ports. And shit. Microsoft knows all

I didn't think the end guy was too hard, really. Maybe I'm just rubbish, but I didn't find the bosses earlier on to be all that easy, either. In the event, the final boss struck just the right balance between being frustratingly difficult and easily defeatable, with practice. Even if you couldn't make Jade dodge the boss's tentacle with ease, you could at least see fairly quickly that that was the aim. As the for the reversed controls/blurred screen thing - evil, pure evil, but still easy to get through with a bit of practice. Most importantly, the boss was varied enough to stay interesting - even when you had to do a couple of things twice. I hate "hit the monster until its arse opens then fire a rocket in.... three times, for that is the magic gaming number" bosses with a passion. The final 'twist' did seem a bit gratuitous, but really, who doesn't want a BG&E sequel? Jade and the DomZ, what?! Explain please, sequel.

My computer is going to be upset with me.

I stick everything in C:\Games too It's a habit from the bad old days when games and applications would create a new folder in C:\ and spew their vile innards all over it, so having a Games folder takes care of clutter. Some dumb games still insist on installing to the root directory (hello UT2004!), so those continue to end up in C:\Games - everything else usually ends up in the default C:\Program Files. There, wasn't that thrilling? I hate, hate, hate, badly thought-out installers though, so I feel your pain. I heartily approve of the trend for games sticking their save files in My Documents, because at least then you have a central location to back up - no rooting through your filesystem looking for remote outposts of gaming civilisation to burn to a CD, just in case you really want to see that one cutscene in X - Beyond the Frontier again.

What the?! Copy protection with a demo? Don't they WANT you to copy it? Apparently The Sims 2 checks for CD-burning software like Nero, and refuses to run if you have it installed. Crapso. Publishers might as well give up with this shit - those who want to pirate are doing it already, those who can't pirate a given game aren't trying hard enough (in which case they're hardly likely to care enough about that game to fork out good money), and most importantly those who buy the thing legally are coming off worst. I installed a no-CD crack for GTA3 recently - after previously having the an attitude of "oh, finding the CD every time isn't so bad" - and my willingness to fire the thing up and have a quick blast has increased tenfold. And the damn thing loads quicker too.