DanJW

Yup, I'm pretty sure they will. I read somewhere that the next one will Meet the Spy, which I'm really looking forward to. I'm just starting to get that hang of the spy a bit more in the game, and he has some great Sean Connery style voice samples ("I was never really on your side!") The pyro suddenly got really good about a week ago when they increased his close-range damage. Now he's utterly superb at clearing out capture points and tight corridors. In fact for the first day I think they buffed him a bit too much - every sertver I went to had insane amounts of firey death. Of course this meant more opportunities to hear my favourite voice clip in the game, from the soldier:

I too have HL2 and Ep1 to give away.

This thread has exellent google ads. Shaved hair indeed.

I think the dev is definitely generalising too much. Sure the "mildly interactive story" is huge in Japan, but there's also a much larger arcade culture than in our hemisphere, a culture that feeds on simple but fiendishly difficult rythm and puzzle games that require utter dedication.

Could it be a firewall or antivirus app that's started blocking them? Also, it's sometimes possible to bring a wayward window back onto the desktop by right-clicking on it in the taskbar and selecting "move", then drag it left. It's tricky though since you can't see what you're doing.

Hah, that'll be the day!

Awesome.

Drawn to be Alive?

Yeah, I think we have to draw a line between in-game mechanics and outside-game controller technology. Not that the controller isn't important, obviously (hello Wii), but it's different.

Emo Parker was unintentionally hilarious. Anakin was just fucking annoying and boring. After reading ur debatez, I haf desidid that Gears of War shall henceforth be lablled "Turd Third Person Shorter", here and in all Thumbs places. Discussion over. TPS wins. FPS loses. Henceforth, anyone, anywhere, getting it wrong is surely a P-zombie.

There is a way out of this; we can come up with new meanings for the letters F and P, maybe even S as well. Then we will be able to call any "run n gun" ( ) game an FPS. Something like, uh, Firefight Perpetuation Simulator, or Freaky Psychopath System, or Fantasia Paramount Sharon, or, you know, whatever. Have a go!

I prefer it to the awful phrase "run and gun".

I'm posting this here as a kind of note-to-self, but also just general advice to the world at large. Most of you probably already know about these, from tragic personal experience. Generally I'm good, but now and again I'll think "that looks like an interesting discussion title" and I go in... and then shortly after I am filled with anger and frustration and I feel like logging out... of the human species. Warning: while most the sites below are excellent resources that can and should be used safely, do not under any circumstances read their user comments or message boards, at risk of damage to your brain and sociomental machinery. 1. Youtube user comments 2. IMDB forums 3. BBC News 'Have Your Say' That's the top 3. Anyone have any others to add? Are the Kotaku comment threads still similarly toxic?

Team Fortress 2 is utterly mental. I'm doing incredibly badly but having great fun along the way.

Yes, second-person would be the point of view of your victim or attacker. A Japanese survival horror game, Psiren, had second-person sections which sounded quite scary.

Just saw Death Proof, and I really liked it. I didn't find the first act with all its dialogue particularly boring. It was pretty creepy, but also done with a lightheartedness that gave the first attack so much more impact (pun!). The second act I loved completely. But then I have a soft spot for 70's road movies - and that's exactly what this was. It was a homage to all the films mentioned within the movie, as well as others like Easy Rider and Duel. If you've seen and enjoyed the movies of that ouvre I expect it will make it much eaier to "get" Death Proof.

OK OK I apologise for the Goldeneye comments, I'm sure it's a great game. But when it came out and all the morons at my school were going delirious over it, I was left slightly unimpressed. Sorry, but thats how it was. In other news: Own up - who here is Gay for the Chief?

Goldeneye was rubbish if you happened to have been playing Quake for a while. But yes, it too was a step forward for console FPS. cf your own filling meal anology

That's an easy one. It was the first FPS that was properly designed to be played on a console, making proper use of the anolgue sticks and with gameplay pacing that better suited the Xbox memory requirements. And as a result of this it was enjoyed by many Xbox kiddies who had not grown up with Doom, Quake, System Shock or any of the other fine examples of the history of FPS. All the hyperfandom since then has just been a case of momentum. Incidentally, before it was brought out by Microsoft, Halo was intended for PC and had a concept somewhat similar to STALKER or a single player Battlefield - massive open areas with AI conflicts devloping on the fly. That sounded really cool.

Ah yes! So I did Bob. Good call.

Something just occurred to me, after having read you pointing this aout and then PA Tycho's consideration of a 10 score as kind of system error. That something is the realisation that game review scores have become logarithmic! It all makes sense now - the way that 7 is average and 5 is poorly mediocre. The way a huge chasm exists between an 8 and a 9.5. It is because for every whole number in the score the quality of the game, as scientifically measured by the reviewer, increases by a whole magnitude. It is not 1 point better but a whole order better. It is the difference between 10xn7 and 10xn8, and possibly more digits besides!!! Or maybe game review scores are just wank. And yes, it was likely given a ten to avoid rioting. The US government probably advised them to do this.

You forget that Japanese otaku are all superpowered completionist ninjas.

Ahhh Lotus. My first PC came with Lotus apps. Excel was like a revelation after 1-2-3, believe me. I quite possibly started wearing sunglasses and rapping about it.

So what do we consider to be some of the good endings that have been made? Personally, I think MGS3's ending was excellent, both the gameplay and the movies that followed it. I used the unlocked level selector to watch the endings several times, I loved it so much; even the music over the credits.

The problem is that sometimes the first part of a game to get made turns out the worst. This is most often because it takes a while for the designers to get the hang of the tools and the pacing of the game engine, and to come up with ideas for nice little touches. In addition while the first thing that is made ought to get the most testing, there is rarely enough time to redo it from scratch, so it gets left pretty much as-is.