DanJW

looks more like 300 to me

Haha thanks y'all.

I'll watch Lost once it's finally finished and someone makes a Phantom Edit that I can enjoy in only a few days, without having to wade through hours of bullshit filler.

Call it Toblix Fucks Games . I'm pretty interested in Anniversary as well. I never played more than a level or two of the first Tomb Raider game on the PS1 and didn't rate it (since I was playing Quake at the time, I was less than impressed by the tile-based engine). Never saw anything I liked in any of the sequals either and I still consider the franchise to be overrated, except maybe Legends. This remake seems like a great way to enjoy the original now that it has caught up with the rest of gaming.

Haze is the new FPS by Free Radical. Will include 4-player co-op goodness. It seems to have a slightly subversive message judging by the great corporate video style trailers.

Ah yes, how could I forget Spore? Also, I'm somewhat intrigued by Haze.

The game I'm most looking forward to is Assassin's Creed. Bioshock I'm not quite as hyped about, but it's definitely on my list. Also Quake Wars and all the games in the HL2-Ep2, Portal and Team Fortress 2. I'm cautiously interested in The Witcher. Also Crysis, althought thats a ways off and will require a bank robbery to pay for a new PC.

You missed a perfectly good opportunity for a birthday suit gag there. In fact, gag is what you made me do. Hap' to the bidet Ginger.

Idle Thumbs: bringing families together through the offering of ... small cat testicles. Can I say goodbye to the old Raz before he goes away?

Implicit rather than explicit? Yes I think so.

Yup, I saw the original ending. What happens is

A while ago Jack Black posted a photo of himself next to his (huge) TV screen to prove that he had got 100% in Project Gotham Racing (or something like that).

I decided to have a British horror movie video weekend and watched both The Descent and Creep. I'd heard heard good things about Creep, but I really didn't rate it. I found it really uninteresting; boring villain (I was hoping that it would turn out to be a rat king, but it didn't) and completely unlikeable heroine. I really wanted her to die, but instead I just had to watch as she completely failed to intervene in the deaths of the much more likeable supporting cast. The Descent was much more enjoyable, and I recommend it to everyone. From the same writer/director as Dog soldiers, but a very different movie to that one. The all-female cast is incredibly refreshing and well written and the spelunking depicted really does make you feel claustrophobic. Then the scary stuff starts... My only advice is to watch it on a decent display since there were parts in the dark where I had trouble telling what was going on. So: watch The Descent, don't bother with Creep.

Also is she single?

Well, no-ones making it, they just sold the rights. Probably to some clueless studio exec with more money than brains. "Look, wouldn't you like to own the film rights to the worlds best selling video game, also the game most played by women? Great! that will be $1B please. HAHAHA so long sucker!"

Ray Winstone is always class - and he is soon to be the voice of Beowulf! Can't get much more rock hard than that. Hmm, having just played too much God of War II, I now have utterly convincing visions of a Beowulf game made with the same engine. Hot Damn!

The way I see it and the main plot hole for me

Give that man a frontpage link! (since we're a blogroll now). There are a couple of counter-arguments that I can think of with this (for the sake of devils advocate). One is that in the absence of moral judgment most players will choose the quickest route. And it may not even be the route you thought of. Players are like water, flowing along the most economical path. In this mindset they won't even stop to think about the moral implications of, say, using a civilian as a human shield, if it means they still win at the end. In the absence of any moral judment by the game they can perform this action and still think of themselves as the good guy. Secondly a lot of people in the industry are slowly starting to admit that games do need to take a moral stance. If you design a game world in which there are no real consequences for killing civilians - even if you didn't mean to (eg there is police response but players have found a way to easily escape it) - then you might have cause to question you own ethics for releasing such a game to children. This in turn does not look good to the non-gaming public. All other media exist in an ethical landscape - games alone claim to exist in moral vacuum. But I do agree with you. The depiction of moral dilemmas in games is so heavy handed at the moment that it is beyond abstraction.

Right Rodi, I too am expecting some big reveals from Blizzard closer to the actual release date. What those could be I have no idea. Oooh oooh I just thought of something possibly innovative in the game! The liquid particle dynamics AI of the zerg swarms. That's pretty exciting from a tech standpoint if you ask me.

Looks like were-sheep to me. Still FTW though.

Here's the Penny Arcade strip for this. One of the best they've done. I even showed it to my mum More amusing is the other newspot linked to in the video description, a report on how ...

AHGHGHGHGHGHHGHG that is all. edit: OK despite the fact that I'm on the last chapter I just can't be bothered to finish it. The combat has become infuriating. I'm going to go and play God of War II, then maybe after that I'll start this again on normal difficulty. The combat system is utter arse and this would be more obvious to if it wasn't for the kick death gimick.

Wait for it... wait for it.... Revenge at last!

It might lead to a treatment - if depression is associated with a shrunken hippocampus, then the right spatial awareness exercises could conceivably build it up and counter the depression. That's just a hypothesis though.

Ok I've been playing this and generally I've found the experience more frustrating than anything else. Playing it on hard I die way too easily (I wish I'd played on easy because I'm too far to be bothered to start again). Any major fight I have to play multiple times because I keep dying - so much that it gets boring. I dont get a chance to enjoy the fights because I have to play so defensively to stay alive. I have to back into a corner so that no-one can flank me, because if they do - instadeath. The flinging into spikes and off ledges is often the only way to get past a fight, since my weapons and spells are so ineffective. Neither do I have a chance to fling crates about and interact with environment during a fight the way way I'm presumably meant to. I can't tell how much space my body is taking up, so that I think I'm blocking but I still get hit - in the shoulder or knee or something, I can't tell. Likewise I can't judge my own reach - it was fairly late in the game that I discovered that a longsword will hit enemies that appear to be 10 feet away. Hell even the dagger appear to dice people up without making contact with them, but I keep intuitively getting right up close to what the contact range looks like. Even Oblivion had a more satisfying sense of contact. Also instakill traps that are undectable unless you save up loads of points for the skill to see them. Lose Normally I choose to go with magic in these games since it tends to be more visually and tactically interesting, but the magic is rubbish. again, no sense of impact when a fire arow hits a target. Even the higher level spells feel weak. The only good spell is telekinesis, which we know is really just the half-life 2 grav gun. So I gave up after a while and tried stealth, which is only effective against solitary enemies and feels tacked-on. Then finally tried melee with the results above. Oh and archery seems likewise pointless, but I do like the rope bow as a puzzle solving device. The annoying thing is that there is almost a good game there - all the mechanics and physics of the source engine, dustructable environments etc. But the actual level design and game balance feels really retro. It's like playing Hexen 2 on the Quake 2 engine. (Ok there are a few atmospheric environments, but what I really mean is encounter design). Maybe it's the AI. Guys with swords rush you and surround you. Mages back away from you and summon meat shields. Meh. I'm slowly giving up hope on there ever being a first person melee system that I like. Maybe I'm just rubbish at the game, but I dream of the day someone designs a fluid, exciting, intuitive, procedural melee combat system, preferably in first person. But more and more I think I'm going to have to settle for the third person console action of God of War type games for my realtime swords and sorcery fix. My next hope for the definitive sword fighting action game: Assassins Creed. If the combat in that plays the way it looks like it does, then I will need several pairs of new pants, Next report will likely be on: STALKER edit: ok a question: should I bite the bullet, admit that I'm crap, and start again on normal difficulty? Or should I push forward to the end and hope that something clicks in my head and I suddenly understand how to win the combat in a fun way? edit edit (I'm on my out of the Necropolis after discovering Arentir's plans from his journal).