DanJW

I'm not a qualified professional, but you might have been borderline dehydrated before you started drinking. With the power-walking dehydrating you even more, your gut would suck up all the moisture it could - including a heavily concentrated burst of alcohol. Low blood sugar from having skipped a meal would exacerbate this, as you said. If you were in the early stages of a cold or flu that you hadn't noticed yet, this would also make it worse.

My guess would be some kind of rating/ranking system. Maybe a Battlefield style class?

Ahem... I would like to make a suggestion: X-COM: Total War

I love the first two X-COM games and I still play them now and again. I've never managed to finish Terror From the Deep though (man that game is tough). I agree a lot with Kolzig. I would prefer a strategy game. Even as an FPS it needs certain things to make it XCOM. Some kind of R&D would be nice and wide-scale strategic choices as well as battlefield tactical ones. The aliens need to be mysterious with elements of their technology and nature discovered over time as a result of hard work, extreme daring and luck. Also terror missions. Also world governments secretly siding with the aliens. Also randomly generated terrains of a number of different types. Also X-com soldiers having a high rate of attrition, something made all the more painful for being able to name them after all your friends and favourite movie characters (I have one TftD game where everyone is named after Battlestar Galactica crew). Also the possibility of being completely unprepared for a new alien species or size of craft and being totally wiped the floor with (It has proven impossible to keep any of the Apollos alive. Even Apollo XIII). I love XCOM. edit: Kolzig, I seem to remember it being stated in UFO: Enemy Unknown (as it was called here) that X-COM agents are drawn from intelligence agencies and special forces all over the world.

Hahah yeha I liked that moment too.

I was going to mention those, but you beat me to it. I will mention that all the infinity engine games now have fan mods that allow you to play them in modern resolutions. Awesome!

http://www.seventhsanctum.com/ has lots of generators to choose from, of various levels of quality and hilarity. Also check out the Ever Changing Book of Names. I really love this little app, it almost feels educational in its authenticity and if you register then you can write your own plugins for it. edit: and from the game generator above: Telekinetic Drug-Dealing Train. Yes.

According to the Zombie Survival Guide, the more isolated the better. Fewer people = fewer zombies. Cities are deathtraps. The ideal location is a subsistence-capable farm that is difficult to reach by foot. If you have some warning of what's happening then you can build new fortifications.

Hmm, I'm thinking I might go with 'Squonky' Danny O'Mashsaddle. Or something.

I don't have a 360 in the house So I'll be getting it for PS3... assuming I am able to afford the game at all. Now I need cheering up. Let's hear what your cowboy name is going to be!

Yeah I practiced Shorin Ryu Karate-jitsu* for several years. Unfortunately that style is pretty rare here in the UK and I couldn't find a new club when I moved town; most karate clubs are mainland Japan Karate-do descended from Shotokan style. I'm going to have another look around, if there's still no karate club I like then I'll consider some other martial art. I think there's a White Crane Kung Fu club in the area, which is the martial art with the most similarity to Shorin Ryu, but I'm also tempted by Tai Chi Chuan. *jitsu ie not really a sport

Awesome! The girl I have been seeing for about a month now does kendo (as well as being a second degree blackbelt in Aikido). Unfortunately for her she is quite petite and none of the armour fits her safely. She is going to have to get some custom made. She showed me a video of a big martial arts gathering in Greece that her club demo'd in. Really cool stuff, makes me want to get back into my gi. She's off for another one in Japan next month. She also plays games on iPhone and PSP Yeah she's awesome.

Really? You never noticed? Even when the Wise Wizard helps the Farm Boy to rescue the Princess from the Black Knight?

The hare was a symbol of the goddess Ostara, whom Easter is named after. She was also a goddess of the moon and the shape in the moon's craters was thought to resemble a hare rather than a man's face. Ostara, or Eastre, is where we get the word Oestrogen from too. What, you thought a Christian festival would place its day based on the phase of the moon? Most Christian holiday traditions are actually pagan traditions. But then everyone knew that already.

It always strikes me how closely it resembles the 'gekko' in Metal Gear Solid 4 (or rather the gekko resembles it). Actual robots of the future will be increasingly biomechanical I reckon.

http://gamejolt.com/online/games/platformer/specter-spelunker-shrinks/1865/ Platform game with a really nice gimmick. Big payoff at the end.

PS3, I hope.

The Directors Cut adds some silly chapter title screens (taken from the Philosophy of Time Travel book, which can be found online and in the extras anyway) and montage effects in an effort to explain more of what is going on, thus robbing the film of its wonderful ambiguity and sense of the sublime. There are a couple of extra scenes that are more welcome, but on the whole the theatrical cut is better. That film was pretty important to me when it first came out, dealing as it did with the feeling of disconnection and profundity that comes with many mental health problems. I saw How to Train Your Dragon at the weekend. Very entertaining, really enjoyed it. Nice voice acting (despite the Scottish Vikings with their American children), good pacing and story structure, good jokes, nods to geekery and exhilarating visuals. I haven't seen many 3D movies, but this was the first one where things actually looked 3D, rather than like cardboard cutouts or a pop-up book (the live action 3D trailers are the worst for this - 3D is the new green screen when it comes to terrible compositing). Oh and the characterization for the different breeds of dragons was lots of fun.

Yeah the psycho stuff gets a bit 'meh' and may well put a lot of people off. But the actual critique of the films is very very good.

Hi there! It's been a month or two since I last played the awesome game that is Torchlight, but I think I can answer some of your questions. Yeah, magical items are basically worthless until they have been ID'd. Make sure you have a decent supply with you, but only use them on stuff you might want to switch to mid-dungeon. Compare it to your current stuff, discard the weaker one in the pet pack and send him to town when full. The rest you can get ID'd when you get back to town yourself. After health and mana, pack space and ID scrolls are the major "budget decision" n the game (if that design terminology means anything to you). Single-handed weapons tend to shoot faster, but much weaker. Certain powers work better when they are working with a higher maximum damage (since the budget for special abilities is mostly mana, not cast time). Certain skills can make dual wield more worth it, although I never found any point in using two pistols at once, mores the pity. I was hoping it would make shooting even faster, but instead they just alternate at the same fire rate. Still, if you find an ultra powerful pistol combined with a good sword it is well worth it (and the pistols are so damn cool...) The shitty wizard does indeed tell you how much gold each enchantment will cost, after you slot the item into his window. It increases with the item level and how many enchantments it already has. Rebinding... I think so, but I'm not sure. But here are a couple of good Torchlight wikis that can answer most question you might have (just resist the urge to look up spoilers). http://en.runicgamesfansite.com/rgwiki/ http://www.runicfollower.com/wiki/torchlight/Portal:Torchlight_Main Happy delving!

That script is spot-on. It is exactly the film I saw in the cinema. And yeah, American McGee's Alice would have been a more interesting film. From what I understand, it was that game which got this movie remake optioned in the first place.

I've been watching Warehouse 13. A number of people were hoping that it would essentially amount to SCP: the series (The SCP Foundation AKA the scariest fiction on the internet). It's not that. The artefacts in Warehouse 13 are not nearly as imaginative, brilliant or as worrying as those in the SCP and instead the writers mainly rely on objects supposedly belonging to famous historical figures, an approach that quickly becomes both predictable and difficult to believe. Add to that a lazy visual style (the tesla punk is nice enough, everything else meh) and worst of all massive, gaping plot holes... the writers just aren't going that extra mile. For a show that openly courts geeks - what with the subject matter and references to 'redshirts', internet acronyms and guest appearences from BSG cast - the writers fail to show the attention to detail that would actually please their target demographic. If the warehouse is meant to have lots of safety protocols... show us some actual intelligent protocols, not just ones that serve as lame mcguffins. Same goes for the artefacts themselves. Which is a shame, since the show is actually OK. Yeah it can be described as 'X-Files without the Angst', but it is a lot better than most other sub-X-files type paranormal investigation shows of recent years; the characters are all likeable, dialogue is fine and everything is fun enough and all together it is very watchable. But it is just OK, when with a bit more effort it could have been something great and very interesting, really catching the crest of the current 'secret history' wave.

Yeah I agree - although Burton still celebrates eccentrics, he has developed a tendancy to try and explain them. He has lost the magic and mystery. This was especially evident in Alice in Wonderland, where 'Underland' felt far too structured, ordered even, rather than the realm of chaos and non-sequiturs that it was in the Lewis Carrol stories.

I liked the premise, the art, the dialogue... most things about the demo. But I hated that it was JRPG in terms of gameplay, which is the reason I never bought the full games. Maybe they should have made each episode a different style of game? Although that would have pretty much tripled what was already a tight budget I guess. Ugh, I hate JRPG gameplay (maybe with one or two exceptions, but I can't think of them right now).

I rewatched Alien recently as well, for the first time in aaaages. First time I saw it was in French, which somehow made it scarier. You are right about the rough cut - horrible, and one of the few scenes where the film has aged badly. I didn't mind the air-vent flash so much but for absolutely gut-splitting laughs go to the extras menu and watch the deleted cut of