DanJW

Oh Well do post again if something occurs to you. Idle Thumbs: We're all about exposition!

Aaaaaaand relax..... Norfolk, didn't Lincoln have dark hair? Good thingy though

I think that's the nice thing about the art style - it is clean, minimalist and minty-fresh. Anything of interest will be colour-coded. But really there is very little to notice except the possible routes. The environment is the game, as befits a free-running simulator.

If you have a decent PC then get it for that. It runs surprisingly well on my Radeon X800 XT, which isn't even officially supported - but I've also seen it on a Crysis-capable kit, and on that it is jaw-dropping.

The Vice City engine may well be better suited, at least for a mod team. A possible problem with the GTAIV engine could be that it can only handle so many 'pedestrians' at one time. It might really chug if you pack the street with a whole horde. But yeah, the prospect of choosing and fortifying your own hideout, making sure you shake off any following ghouls before returning home to keep it secret, heading out on regular supply gathering missions... I can practically taste it!

I think I only killed one guard on the way out. The first guy gets taken out by radroaches and the rest you can sneak past or run away from. I'm on the last chapter of Moira's questline, and if nothing else it has been great comic relief. "Mines are terrible, awful weapons that can lay dormant for years. But the great thing about them is it's easy to make your own!" Besides the main questline it is Moira's breadcrumbs that have been leeding me around the worldmap. Talking of the main quest line, I urge everyone to play it up to the point where . There is a superb Twilight Zone style quest called "Tranquility Street". It reminds me of the best Dark Brotherhood quests in Oblivion. I'm going to ease off on the main story now though, as I've heard the game ends when it does. One thing I like about the game, which is common to both Fallout and Oblivion, is the living world random-event possibility. A couple of times now I have found dead bodies of named charcters in out-of-the-way places. Who were they? Who killed them? How long has the body been here? Where did they get this awesome rifle which I am now taking for my own? I can only answer the first question by replaying the game from the start (which I will do with a thoroughly evil character - my current vault-dweller is a reluctant hero, but it didn't take long for Free Dog to start praising him on the airwaves and then Talon Company to come after him). Cigol, not that I'm disagreeing with you, but what would you expect from a true Fallout sequal? Is it just the combat system? Or something about the storytelling? I'm interested in the specifics of what you started to say.

True, sandbox games are just crying out for a zombie treatment. I guess Dead Rising is a sandbox really, but a whole zombie-ridden city done GTAIV style would be incredible, and simultaneously excuse many of the quirks such a game tends to throw up. Zombies seem to be everywhere at the moment, so it can only be a matter of time.

I do get this. Recently after my PC died and I reinstalled everything, I only really had steam on the system. Hence I ended up playing only TF2, CS:S and various HL2 mods. After a couple of weeks I was incredibly irritable whenever I played, getting really frustrated with my team-mates the whole time. Then I installed Terror from the Deep for a change of pace and felt much better.

I don't think you can change the camera. My guess is that sackgirl is behind the backdrop, in a small room where every wall in a button. Running in a direction presses the button and moves the ship. jumping hits another button that makes the ship fire.

They get taken over by bots. On the first day some people played split-screen and seemed to do fine with 2 AI players helping them. It's possible that you can lower the player count on the server settings, but if so I'm betting it will be tough, even with fewer zombies. You normally need at least one other guy to give covering fire while you help up a prone friend - and players will go down at some point. If you're the last man standing, even with full health, then only a miracle can save you. But the way the game encourages teamwork means that you'll probably be fine having two random online players join you and your friend.

It plays awesomely! Second day at the EG Expo I spent most of it managing the queue for Left 4 Dead, and had a couple of goes on it myself. People were standing in line for an hour to have a second go. Perhaps the most impressive thing is the 'horde'. The bog standard zombies. Most of the time they mill about aimlessly, banging their head against the wall and stuff, and a couple may shuffle towards you. But if too much noise is made then they will start to wake up and begin running at you. Occasionally a major in-game event will kick off and a big message appears on screen saying 'Player 3 Alerted The Horde!'. Then a whole tonne of them will come at you, almost always from where you were not expecting. The impression of a crowd of homicidal maniacs charging is incredible! They move very realistically, and can climb over any obstacle to get to you. Nowhere is safe, because they will scale walls, climb fences, bash down doors, crawl under cars... they will always find a way. The animation is superb. The trick to gameplay seems to be 'don't get corned'. It becomes an exercise in crowd control - you can survive sustained attack as long as the numbers don't start to stack up. But the zombies know how to pick their targets, and will often gang up on the weakest team member and hem them in. The teamwork mechanic is also excellent. As well as the 'ganging up' thing, several of the boss zombies specialise in incapacitating a single player, which means if their friends are not nearby to save them they will be helpless. Luckily there are several stages of 'death'. When you lose all your health you go 'incapacitated' where you fall to the floor and get given a temporary health bar, but you can still shoot with your pistol. From this position a friend can run over and help you back up on your feet, restoring some regular health. Similar situations occur if, say, you fall off a roof and are left hanging on by your fingertips. If you get bundled by the horde while prone or no-one can come to get help you, you will die. Luckily there are occasional 'trapped survivor' rooms that if found, will respawn any dead players. Also if you go prone too many times then your screen will go monochrome and one more knockdown will kill you. Helping another player out of a sticky situation, or healing them with a first aid kit, feels great. The game gives plenty of feedback on everything that's happeneing so a message will come up telling everyone who saved who and from what. The dramatic AI pacing thing is perfect. After watching the game for a whole day I never saw a level play out the same way twice, and I never got bored of it. Finally, it's amost more fun to fail the mission than to win. Seeing utter chaos break loose, with one player being ripped up by a hunter, another strangled by a 'smoker', one guy being mobbed to the floor by the horde and the fourth player trying to help them while taking on a tank while a molotov cocktail explodes around him... and knowing that all is lost and waiting for each health bar wink out one-by-one Aliens style... is hilarious.

Hah, yes, best beard selection in ages. Shame the hairstyles are all a bit lame.

Yeah, I agree with everything that's being said here. ie: It's very obviously the Oblivion engine hence; Animation and combat sucks. Luckily; VATS works much better than I thought it would. It still doesn't make it anything like the old Fallout games though, as "choose a body part to shoot at" is not exactly strategic. Dialogue and setting are great though, with lots of lovely little details. Also the SPECIAL system is much more fun than the elder scrolls jump-grinding method. Actually I think this might be the best hacking minigame I've seen. Basically, choose a word from the big mishmash of 'code'. If you guess wrong it will tell you how many letters are correct, which will help you with your next guess. Number of guesses depends on your science skill I maybe. Think of it like a game of Hangman.

I can almost garuntee that the kid was being bullied at school, or something else was going on. CoD4 was the excuse for playing truant, but there's always a deeper reason, especially with a reaction like this.

Yeah, I think I'm with Yufster et al on this: The girl is a nasty skank; Brand is an utter cunt; the furore over the incident is completely ridiculous. Ross doesn't bother me as much as he does some people. But if there is one lesson to be learned here it is 'have nothing to do with Russel Brand, or on your own head be it'. Basically no-one comes out of this looking good, including the complaining public and politicians. Except maybe Sachs himself - he's remained pretty dignified and restrained through the whole thing.

I got to play the first level - the demo I guess - at the EG Expo. It's good. The first time you play it feels horribly awkward and clumsy. Then after a few deaths it clicks and you get into the rhythm and it all flows really nicely. Basically there is no 'jump'; you have 'upward movement' and 'downward movement' which are context sensitive. So on the ege of a roof upward movement will be a jump, but in other situations it will be a mantle or a wall-run. Your momentum also playes a part - the faster you are going the more smoothly the mantle or whatever will be pulled off. Then there's the way you learnto interpret the colour-coded environment too. At first you only see the obvious routes, but after a while you can see alternatives, most of which you will need added momentum to achieve well. Combat is very tricky, and looks like it will take longer to master the various judo moves. But that's good, it encourages you to run away if you can. The emphasis on continous flowing movement made me think of something - after playing I said to Bob, "this is what the 3D Sonic games should have been like". And I was right.

Someone at C4 has been watching Shaun of the Dead.... Also, the recent spat of reality-TV spoofs is too postmodern, it makes my head asplode.

I dunno, I'm starting to think that there is no such thing as unfitting music for this video. Marek dance goes with anything! ... Marek is the new black.

Damn, we need a word for that feeling! Something in german would work, in the same gist as shadenfreude. Erfolgverboten perhaps?

Hmm, you're right. I suppose having decided on the "choice changes the past" flavour, having a the "jigsaw puzzle" flavour as well would be a cop-out. The jigsaw puzzle method has been done before and is something we are used to - which may be why several people wish it existed here. We often unconciously desire the familiar. Change is scary I don't have a problem with the alternate realities in this case, since we are told about it right up front in the intro. Its purpose is to provide a complete story with each playthrough - not to provide a single piece of the story. edit: having said that, the intro does in fact say "You are about to read a story. Or rather, part of a story". But it also says the stuff about there being several possible stories and protagonists.

I think he means that in most games the branches are false, or at least purely cosmetic. The most you can hope for is a detour before rejoining the main narrative path. In a way it is a very elegant solution to the problem. The reason why most games don't branch much is due to inflation of assets. If the story path is x units long, and you have n branches, then you will need x X n assets to cover thw whole game (for example). So what Aisle has done is to reduce x so that n can be increased.

OK, I'm slightly embarassed about this, but I'm quite enjoying BBC's Merlin. They've decided to pull a 'Smallville', so all the main arthurian charcters are in their early teens, with some age differences tweaked and relationships changed so that fun can be had with foreshadowing and dramatic irony. The teen actors are supported by an excellent adult cast though - Richard Wilson, Anthony Head, John Hurt's voice and various guest stars. And Katie McGrath as one totally foxy Morgana Le Fey. OK, so it's aimed at a younger audience, meaning that the levels of danger are normalized; not-very-dangerous things are made out to be quite dangerous indeed, whereas actual violence and peril is toned down so as not to scare the kiddies (may contain mild peril!) A lot of things about it are very variable in quality. eg... The CGI: magical effects look good, but creature CGI is embarassing. Where's the Walking with Dinosaurs Dragons team when you need them? Camera Direction: I'm not a big fan of BBC camera direction these days. Everything tends to look rushed or like footage of a stageplay. I'm probably spoiled by excellent camerawork in US series like BSG. It has flickers of potential though. Dialogue: sometimes very awkward in that BBC children's drama way, but has occasional little gem's like "I can't sit by and watch him die" - "So don't look". Plus there's the 'historical' and 'canonical' inaccuracies. But really what did I expect? I find it watchable though and a pleasant way to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon.

Ahahahah I am 100% that should Marek die in a tragic accident, this one will be shown at his memorial service. Quick, Marek, I need you to fake your death!

You know that question really makes me want another Death Race 2000 game (also known as Carmageddon). I was so disappointed that they took the pedestrian-killing satire out of the movie remake

Ha! it doesn't work see? Because I did it first! I guessed your reaction and did it myself, thus puncturing your venom, er, bubble... just like in 8 Mile! Yeah dawg! edit: P.S. Please don't ban me.