Thrik

The Pyro is great fun and I love ambushing people, but I'm telling you guys, Demoman is where it's at! Once you get the hang of using the stickies in most situations and predicting where people are going to go, you can pretty much arsehole anyone. It is entirely hilarious getting a sticky under a heavy, sending him flying up into the air with it, and then making sure you've laid two or three more to finish him when he lands. :tup: :tup:

But didn't you see that tear forming on the right bulge of the heart? ;(

Hee, well I did find the reminiscence quite startling when I first saw the companion cube. So much that I wanted to tell the world! I mean, my box had a heart on it, and it was moveable using the revolutionary 'physics' engine in Half-Life 1. It being moveable was in fact the whole point. Then this Portal comes along, has a box with a heart on it, and it's moveable using the revolutionary (for real this time) physics engine in Half-Life 2. It began with a regular moveable box in Glider; players found ways of essentially getting it anywhere in the map during beta testing, and it became a bit of a challenge to see how far you could get it. It was removed when Valve bought the game, but I was asked to do a texture for a tribute to it that'd be hidden in the map. You could only get to it by jumping into a hidden teleport near the bunkers, which'd take you to a crazy room where you could play with the love heart version to your heart's content. This later became a race track with multiple love heart moveable boxes to push along. It probably is just a coincidence, but it weirded me out at first as it was probably the biggest easter egg DoD ever had. And nobody remembers it -- too well hidden!

Heh, you'll get into it soon enough. Note that those big circles with the score at the bottom of the screen also point towards the direction of the intelligence like a compass, including when the enemy is carrying it.

It's time zone adjusted. If we're having difficulty finding a private server, Wireplay runs a community server in the UK that's intended for community events like this. The Wireplay community itself only actually has them once a week though so it's invariably empty and passworded. I'm expecting it'll be more a case of not many people turning up though and us just having to go into some public server. It's my sister's birthday tonight so I myself might end up going afk a bit. The public server IP in the Steam announcement looks like a waste of time though as it's full to the brim. We're much better off finding a low-population server if we take that route.

I think 7pm is probably the most balanced time. It's still before midnight for the UK, and hopefully most people will be back from work in the US by then if they happen to be mental and working on weekends. I could manage that in the week too so regular games ought to be OK.

Maybe I'd click the ads if it didn't keep showing some gay relationship thing. :tdown: :tdown: I'm not even kidding.

I don't think it really matters seeing as they're typical Google ads. I'm guessing the click rate of regular members sits somewhere around the high end of nothing.

I still had the HD trailer lying around on my never-ending hard drive so I've put it on GameVideos: http://www.gamevideos.com/video/watch?video=15850&largeFormat=wmv Seeing as it has weirdly become pretty pesky to get hold of.

I think a lot of bloggers burn themselves out because they do feel obligated to promise constant posts and then inevitably fail to deliver satisfactorily; likewise, feeling obligated to provide magazine-quality posts has killed a few blogs I've observed. The self-imposed stress of keeping up with a schedule or quality control can take the fun out of it. I find it's better to just post when I spot something interesting to mention, and my reader counts haven't really changed significantly despite my regularity having slowed right down. Of course my blog isn't one of the more intellectual ones out there, so I find it pretty easy to be inspired to write about something. Simply being amongst the first to document stuff like new Battlefield 3 and Brutal Legend info gets a lot of people linking to it and stuff, which works wonders for the old motivation.

Man, I was wondering who that random nutter's blog appearing in my WordPress links belonged to. It turns out that nutter is in fact you. Thanks! I'll subscribe and link to your blog.

The key to winning this competition is to get three pumpkins and turn them into one 3D two-headed-baby.

Yeah, the 3rd is good. I can afford to be playing with you guys at like 3am on Saturday, but definitely not Sunday before work. LucasTones!! got TF2 the other day so I'll rope him along if I can, and Huz too.

Yeah, although I love Psychonauts I seriously think it's more likely that I'll grow a second cock than another Psychonauts be released. I don't think Double Fine even has the manpower to work on two full-blown games at once, which is what made the media shit about that 'coming soon' image (blatantly the Psychonauts 1 box art) so questionable. It wasn't a successful game, Tim and Double Fine probably have loads of other ideas brewing and begging to be realised, and in all honesty does the world need more Psychonauts instead of something new and wonderful? I'd take something new and wonderful, anyway.

The 4th is Sunday so unless you're playing at like 4pm EST time you can count me out.

Man, you quoted 'crusade' as if I said that or something. I wasn't trying to criticise you. I'm just saying what we have right know is difficult to enthuse friends with in casual conversation as you pointed out with this thread, so it might be worth just waiting until there's more to talk about. I used the 'games that sound cool but are shit' concept as if from the perspective from my friends; they have no idea why Tim Schafer should command attention, so to them it's no different to the designer of, say, Splinter Cell. Just another game out there. Incidentally, I personally have found I wouldn't know how to sum up some great games to friends so far in advance of them coming out. When BioShock was announced all we knew about it is that it was made by the System Shock 2 guys and that it had guys in underwater suits. I knew back then (going back to 2004 here) it'd end up being great, and it did, but I sure as hell wouldn't have known how to get people as excited as I was about it back in 2004. I just knew it'd be good because of the designers and the vague theme. I see Brutal Legend in the same way. But hey, my friends aren't your friends. Perhaps you can communicate this type of thing better with them. I just know the words 'Tim Schafer', 'metal', and 'Jack Black' aren't going to really stir any emotions in them whatsoever, so I wouldn't even try without some convenient marketing to point out.

Well to be perfectly honest there isn't much awesomeness to get across yet. Granted, the Schafer involvement and the theme are very cool, but to someone not intimately familiar with either there's kind of fuck all there for them to bet excited about. Many cool concepts have come and gone across the years and ended up being absolutely shite games -- the fact Double Fine is doing this one means nothing to most people. Probably best to just let Sierra's marketing do its magic, because getting mates excited now about a game that's a year away is pretty much a waste of time. Why bother? At the very most I'd bring it up a month or so before it comes out.

You know, I've been hearing a lot about this companion cube and it sounds an awful lot like the box I produced for official Day of Defeat map 'Glider' back when those movable boxes in Half-Life were all the rage! Clearly I should have got a cut of the DOD purchase.

I think I'd wait until knowing exactly what type of gameplay it is before attempting to explain it to anyone. The gameplay would be leverage for those who aren't into metal/rock, the theme would be for those who are, and Schafer would be leverage for anyone who played his past games. If I were forced to explain it to neither fans of metal nor Schafer though, it'd be something like, "It's a game where you play as a roadie for a metal band and have to kill demons that've taken over the world. It has all blokes from classic metal bands doing characters... Jack Black as well." Except with plenty of dialect and slang thrown in there, clearly.

Yeah, I like a good bit of blowing every now and then too.

Hee, Sierra's FTP is great. I like it when they keep these big time sinks of media/demos/etc going for years, kind of like LucasArts' FTP (although I swear theirs was once more full of stuff).

Sierra's FTP would appear to be wrecked at the moment, probably from the bandwidth that was presumably burnt like a bonfire. I was hoping GameTrailers would mirror the HD version like they usually do, but it appears not as of yet: http://www.gametrailers.com/game/5666.html

Yeah, those aren't in-game. It's hard to gauge just what exactly the in-game graphics will end up being like as we're not sure at what stage the assets and engine are at. There seems to be a bit of inconsistency in how polished various bits of the game actually look (based on the magazine and website). We are talking about Double Fine though here, and the game is only coming out on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. I'd say it's pretty safe to assume that the end result will be something quite visually overwhelming.

Erase your cookie for the Brutal Legend site. Feel victim to that one earlier. ¬

This guy has a very good point! It is clear Schafer decided to check every single box on the 'cool' list, albeit from the perspective of a different audience than usual.