Huz

Is that 'Isabella'? That one is a winner. WINNER! Also, I await Series 5 with baited breath. Back on topic now.

Best. All of them. Although the comm screens on Supercars 2 made me weep, more often than not, because I'd be doing brilliantly only to get the "police" one. Argh! I think I only managed to avoid a massive fine on one occasion.Carrier Command was great too, a really early example of RTS. If anyone suddenly wants to play it, grab the DOS version from 1988 off The Underdogs - it works under XP! Now that's compatibility! A serious computing tool, surely!

Terry Jones is ace.

Good point! Apply that to any situation where you have to wait for no reason. As an example, take Burnout 2 on the Gamecube and its endless "Please wait" messages - which appear when it saves your 'progress' to the memory card (which it does even when you haven't made any) and when it reloads the level you're already on. A small irritation, but it all adds up. Mrrrgh.

I remember this. I had no Amiga 1200 at the time. Instead I played Death Mask. It was fun, especially in split-screen multiplayer, although being able to see exactly where you friend was at all times rather spoiled the surprise when they popped up in front of you, guns blazing.

Are PCs still bad at single-PC multiplayer gaming? With joysticks and joypads now being USB, there is no excuse for not having as much multiplayer flexibility on the PC as on concoles (other than the obvious problrms of having to crowd around a tiny monitor instead of a heaving behemouth of a TV). Anyway, even without multiple reaal controllers, one player on the keyboard and one on a joystick served us well in the bygone Amiga days. Also, on 'custom' music, I don't think it's anything to do with the in-game music being bad, it's just about adding longevity. No matter how good GTA3's soudntrack is, I got tired of it. Being able to stick my massive wadge of MP3s into the mix made it a little bit more fun for longer. And in fact, having an 'MP3' radio station actually gave me a real reason to play GTA3, because I was getting the chance to hear long-lost MP3s when, erm, setting up a random playlist in WinAMp was too much effort or something. Also my spelling is up the spout, sorry.

'To boff' meant to pass wind at my junior school, briefly. True story! Also British Orienteering Federation.

'Home computers', in my experience, like the Sinclair Spectrum and the Commodore 64/Amiga, were dominant - mainly in the mid-to-late 80s. The ease of pirat0ring the cassette tapes (or floppy disks) counted for a lot... After that, the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) was pretty popular until the PS was coughed up. The idea that every home had a NES during the 80s is pretty much an American thing.

I would think the requirement for DirectX and OpenGL experience is just like Intrepid asking for "JavaScript experience" for that Wintermute game he's doing - in other words they're just looking for experience in that sort of area. Anyway I think you're reading too much into this, sadly - the same programmer advert also requests experience with network programming (among other things), and unless I've been neglecting my fanboy duties, network play doesn't feature in Psychonauts either. Presumably there is actually life for Double Fine after Psychonauts, so maybe that's where these extra requirements have come from? Deadworm's post wasn't there when I started this, honest.

Mixface is probably right with his essay above, but I think another important factor is that everyone secretly wants to be a hero, especially in an interactive medium like games. While it's still at least possible to be heroic when you're just a 'cog in the machine' like a soldier in Call of Duty or something, it's even easier to give you that impression if you're one man fighting against seemingly insurmountable odds, and what bigger and stronger target to fight against than "the government"? I mean, who wouldn't secretly want to be a big revolutionary type like Salvador from Grim Fandango, or Luke Skywalker, except without the danger of getting killed horribly? You can possibly apply this to music too, in that you can feel like you're sticking it to the man (or something) by listening to that sort of thing. Simple as that, I reckon.

Yeah, heathen. It's the fact that you can blow the baddies APART that does it. Load up with quad damage and boom, blast, splatter! So much for all your new-fangled Havok physics, give me Quake and a rocket launcher and some quad damage and watch the body parts FLY! They even bounce. And Quake multiplayer is still some of the most frenetic action-packed, erm, action, ever. In fact... damn it, I hope I've got my Voodoo 2 drivers installed.

Either that or to make "steaming pile of shit" jokes even easier.

Got a bit further this time. The update downloaded, then this: A problem with the Steam network?! Surely not! I'm not sure what's happening here, because it used to complain about being unable to connect, then let me play my games anyway. Whatever's happening, at this rate, I might actually get a game of Opposing Force by tomorrow, if I'm lucky. EDIT - Oh oh! It just connected! I guess I'd better not close it until I'm absolutely sure I've finished with it. :~

I bet you wouldn't need to be that extreme to offend some people. Medal of Honour Frontline Opposing Force, casting you as a German D-Day machine gunner mowing down hordes of brave Yankee warriors? Horrifying! Of course, games about shooting up Germans are considered absolutely fine. Didn't someone release some screenshots for some kind of September 11th-based Half-Life mod? Was that a hoax? Anyway, that game would have raised some excellent uproar if it had been released. Also, I may have heard about that KKK game - is it called "Ethnic Cleansing", or is that something else?

Yes, that is quite impressive, but the way it attempts to stream online-only mods like Counter-Strike while you play them is less awesome and just dumb - as downloading while playing online leads to lag city. The way it insists upon downloading all the latest patches before you can play, even when you only want to have a quick blast on single-player where being all up-to-date isn't important, is also incredibly annoying. I'm definitely not going to purchase HL2 through Steam (unless it's amazingly cheap, which it almost certainly won't be), but I suspect it will rely on Steam even so. That'll be interesting when Valve ceases to exist, which must happen at some point.

Other reasons include: I only want to play Opposing Force! Just to enter its single-player incarnation and roam free!!!! But no! The Valve gods decree it will not be so! And this, as much as anything else, is why any centralised subscription-esque system like the Phantom is doomed to failure.

Oh. OK. I was under the impression that countries other than the UK had a FRIACO (hilariously dubbed Friasco because it's secretly rubbish) system, where you can pay a flat fee per month for unmetered dialup Internet access. In fact, I believe Eircom (or whoever runs esatclear.ie[1]) had such a system in 1999 or so, but apparently they got rid of it because it turned out to be unprofitable - I thought it would have made a resurgence by now! Anyway, yes, you dialup people have my sympathies. Have faith! I thought I would never get ADSL, but less than a year ago I got the fateful "we have finally got off our arses and flipped the switch" email from BT (British Telecom). And believe me, those guys don't get off their arses very often! Anyway, yes, end of rambling. Edit: [1] Haha! I see it's now "Esat BT"! Unlucky!

It's rubbish!

I hope this is a joke! I can only agree with the previous posters, you really have to see Wind Waker in action. The first time you see the guards at the forbidden fortress wandering past, you'll be a convert, guaranteed*. Cel-shading does seem to be a bit of a fad nowadays, just like the 'realistic' look, thanks mainly to its successful application in a few past games - and like '24'-style split screens that are omnipresent in TV documentaries, it's being misused horribly and people will start to resent it. Take solace in the fact that in a few years, some new fad will rise up to replace it, and the only games to use cel-shading will have the appropriate amount of thought and effort put it. Probably. * void everywhere

Hate. You. All. It runs really slowly on my computer for some reason, so I'll blame that for my lack of success.

I thought I'd download a lot more demos when I got broadband, but that hasn't really been the case. I used to do the same as Intrepid, downloading big demos overnight, but even then I'd leave the file lying around for a few days before I played it. And I still do, so I probably only play about one demo a month. The last one I played was Painkiller. Demos that made me buy the full game recently: UT2004, just the one Onslaught level (I never even touched the other game modes); hmm, actually that's about it from the past few years. Before that: Hardwar, X - Beyond the Frontier (these two did a good job of showing the potential of the game world), Grim Fandango (wasn't convinced until I saw That Trailer included as part of the full demo), Half-Life (agreed, the 'unique' demo was good!), and Sam and Max Hit the Road (I think the humour is at its peak in the opening scenes, which conveniently the demo covers). Games I bought despite being underwhelmed by the demo - Broken Sword 3. I still haven't actually installed it yet though, so "go figure" as they say. Also Yufster - Getright + auto-reconnect feature + leaving your computer on all night = demos in your hot little hands, eventually. Although in my case with BT Internet, it also equalled "kicked off for 'excessive usage'" so you might want to be careful with that.

Exactly Jake - just what I was about to say. Looking at the image from the Futurama game at the top of this thread, I'd be inclined to say that the nasty look is more down to dodgy modelling than cel-shading per se. It's probably not a great example to use, especially considering many bits of Futurama itself are cel-shaded and look far nicer than that... Anyway, yeah, jp seems to be under the impression that it's the limitations of today's game platforms that stop traditionally animated games being possible - it's not, it's the huge amount of labour involved. The only practical way to do it would be to introduce some kind of automation to the animation process, but since that's effectively what cel shading already is (a fudge to give the impression of a cartoon), I don't think you'd be happy with that either.

This is just impractical, or destined to look rubbish, or both. The cutscenes in Dragon's Lair and COMI look lovely, but how do you apply such a 'traditional' animation technique to an interactive game? Either you painstakingly animate every character from every conceivable angle (impractical) or you restrict your characters to only walking in eight directions (looks rubbish - but this was the approach adopted by every point-and-click adventure game ever), or you restrict camera angles so that certain actions can only be viewed from certain angles, and other such horribly restrictive solutions. Bill Tiller pointed out some fairly obvious stuff related to this in some interview somewhere (vague-o-rama), but I'm sure you remember that. Cel-shading is just so much more flexible. As it happens, I do agree that a fully 'hand-animated' game would be really cool to see, but it's not going to happen without a team of about a million enslaved animators. Besides, have you played Wind Waker? It looks great - I can't imagine it looking much better.

I've never owned a handheld either, but I considered getting a GBA when they were going cheap, once. Anyway, of this next generation, the PSP sounds pretty useless - battery life is supposedly under 3 hours, so unless you want to be carrying a Ghostbusters-style generator on your back or something, it's going to be pretty restrictive. Who needs a handheld with close to the PS2's power anyway? Gaming on the move is best restricted to simple stuff that just passes the time (see the popularity of that Snake game on mobile phones), not vast CPU-guzzling epics. :devil2: On battery life, its Nintendo pedigree and promised features alone, I reckon the DS is the one to watch...

Update: still no complete orbit. I hate you all.