DanJW

The first FPS was Dark Forces. Jedi Knight was the subtitle for Dark Forces 2. TEchinically, this means the full title of the third game was Star Wars: Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi outcast. A classic in the wide field of idotic game titling.

Talk to me Ziggy! Are you there?! Don't give up on me dammit! Someone fetch help! For pete's sake isn't there a coder in the building?!

Yes, the stardock editorial is excellent. The last of the three PA essays, by Daniel James, is also very good.

Publishers are idiots. Why would they not be fighting over this game?

I'm sure we have a few more months of hilarity left whilst Thompson tries to prove a massive world-wide conspiracy against him.

A chance to be on the DVD extras?

It's really just an expression of Sturgeon's Law. The only thing you can do is point more of the public towards good journalism and tell them "this is good journalism", and teach kids in school "what do you think makes good journalism"? It won't make bad or average journalists go away, but perhaps they will get paid less and so be a little more miserable. Here's some good journalism news. Congratulations Remo; having a guest essay on Penny Arcade means you have Won The Internet! You may now proceed to the Next Level.

See! He lasted a couple of months, which is more than I expected.

Heheheh That would be what, the South Pole? GPS presents great possibilities for ARGs. You could also have a GPS version of 'Barcode Battlers', where your position generates the stats for the monsters you fight and the loot you collect.

Yeah, I've still to come across a game that has swordfighting as good as Jedi Knight 2. Apart from Sould Calibur maybe, but that's a different type of game. The JK2 lightsaber was fluid, controllable, and effective. The duel against Desann's apprentice was a particular highlight for me.

No, I only noticed right near the end when it all came tumbling down

Hah! That was pretty clever.

This has got to be an internet first - two people with opposing opinions on a game, gradually converging on something near a consensus.

I'm about to start crying. My Hard Disk won't show up in any OS. BIOS detects it but thats it. Any suggestions? I'm trying to use Bart PE to fix the windows installation, and as soon as the disk returns I'm good to go (it was showing up the other day - before I had the right plugins I needed for Bart PE). Second problem: MGS2 on my PS2 keeps having disc read errors. I've cleaned the disc with a Skip Dr and cleaned the PS2 lens with a cleaning CD. That seemed to do the trick... up until I've just beaten Vamp. Now nothing I do gets it to keep going (I even tried toothpaste!). I've heard rumours that there is some kind of congenital defect on a lot of MGS2 DVDs, so maybe it's that. I'm just about ready to take the PS2 apart and recalibrate the gubbinz. In conclusion: AHHHHGGGGGHGHGHGHGaskhgjohsdauifgsgah :(:(:(:fart::fart::fart:

Hurray! I am posting this from my own PC! It has a fresh hard drive, curtesy of Nick, and a fresh Win XP, curtesy of ginger (more or less). Also thanks to lots of other people for your moral support during these tough times. I think I've got all my hardware drivers updated. Now I just have to install all my software again. And then all my games. And then tweak everything back to how I like it. Sigh.

It's probably Andrew Divoff.

Ha yes, psionic schoolgirl, Akira style! I will accept that, since both the CIA and KGB/GRU did research into ESP during the real Cold War (and we had Yuri in RA2 - in fact 'Yuriko' mans 'Little Yuri', correct?)

Gah!! Also, in the words of one of the Gametrailers commenters; "are all the women in this game porn starlets?"

Not to mention Jonathan Pryce! Incredible cast indeed. Takei's 'all your base' line made me lol. My misgiving about the RA3 footage is that the units have gone completely batshit insane with the scifi. Red Alert was always about WW2/Cold War era hardware, with an 'alternative' technology, 'secret history' twist. The real scifi stuff was left for the main C&C branch of games. Now RA is full of mechs and who knows what else? It's not really what I want

If it wasn't flawed he would have given it a ten!

So when I bought MGS2, I got a free copy of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Since I was bored I started playing it. Now, I've finished it all apart from the bonus mission, but only out of a kind of masochistic curiosity. You see when it came out the game got some great reviews. But to me it seems pretty aweful. The gameplay is limited and repetitive. The levels are tiny and uninspired. The bad guys look great but the player models look horrible and are animated even worse. The game is incredibly frustrating. Even the user reviews from the time say things like "at last no more cheap cash-ins for movie licence games". But to me this feels exactly like a phone-in by the dev. To be honest I am comparing it mostly to God of War, whereas it probably falls more into the crowd control genre. But I never ever feel in control. In the last few levels whenever I won it felt more like chance than design. Often I would keep getting knocked down and be unable to do anything. I don't have much experience of crowd-control games, so maybe I just suck at them. Maybe thats why I keep going back to it every day, despite so often switiching it off in disgust. The game pisses me off and I want to prove that I'm 'better than it is'. Comments? Tell me what I'm doing wrong perhaps. Or feel free to name similar games that are supposed to be great but you can't understand why. Phew. I needed to get that off my chest.

Then again, if it's so easy why isn't anyone else doing it? Since the breakthrough in havok physics implementation in Half Life 2 we haven't actually seen much progress on that side of things. I'm always much more impressed by better physics than I am by more polygons, but I'm usually left wanting.

Haha those are too perfect. But one of these days she's going to find out how nasty you are behind her back.

Did I miss a fun spam?

Hah, yes the Star Wars prequals are awful, thanks to Lucas' fangasm over greenscreen. With the pixel-wide rim lighting to pick out the edges, Christensen looks like a 2D cut-out as well as acts like one.