Ben X

I have not noticed this happening. How annoying! Another word I've seen misused a lot recently is prerogative - it's shifting from "exclusive right" to "right" and thereby becoming useless. I blame Shania Twain.

Simply replacing a random author's surname with a rhyming word is not a pun. Sorry to Edgar Allen Police your humour.

Angered by the taunts of the competing longboat team, mad Max Fury rowed.

I haven't watched this yet, but here's a vid series about Doom mods.

Can the mods delete this thread, please? The repeated pretentious jokes are ruining the forum. Check out e e cummings with the lack of capitalisation and grammar. Soooo pretentious.

I'm on the 4th episode and it's starting to get very tough, with the first annoying enemies - these weird slime things that are really tough to shoot, and explode when they die, which remind of me of the extremely irritating kamikaze things from Duke Nukem - and a couple of really harsh monster closets. Generally still very much enjoying it, though. I like the homing rockets things that the vores shoot, and how you can generally trick them into hitting walls - there's unexpected comedy in legging it round the whole level getting chased by a rocket and trying to make sharp enough corners that it misses you. It's surprisingly short as well, but in a good way - I'm relieved it hasn't turned into the slog that led me to quit previous games. Mouselook is generally an improvement, especially when the levels get multi-tiered. I do sometimes wonder if I'm missing a few targets that I would have got with no mouselook but auto-aim on (and set to the standard 0.93).

Everyone's posting pretty fast here, but: just because it didn't tackle it properly, doesn't mean it didn't tackle it. And to be clear, I don't think we should ban words either, that was a joke(?) Twig was doing.

@Zeus Well, if you call something pretentious that is not pretentious, what are you having pretensions towards being and why are you not that thing?

I'm not sure I'd define "pretentious" as something having bitten off more than it can chew (which I would take to mean something that tackles a subject but doesn't have the skill or time or whatever to tackle it well). I think to fairly describe something as pretentious, you need to decide what it has pretensions towards being or doing and why it is not that thing. I think "intimate knowledge" is a bit much, but you should certainly know the thing well enough to justify the latter point. I think one issue with people using it incorrectly is that they will look at something like Flower or The Forest and call it pretentious simply because it is a video game with pretensions to being art, which they do not believe is possible.

I don't know if the games I've played so far have lent themselves to fair or disingenuous use of "pretentious"... But yeah, I don't deem it appropriate very often!

I do!

Of course!

Well you'll have to prove that, otherwise I'll go ahead and keep on using it.

I use pretentious correctly, so I will continue to use it.

Okay, why is everyone going on at me? I said I'd try it like 5 posts ago!

As Salacious said, it accidentally introduced rocket-jumping.

I had noticed the key that you hold down for mouselook, but I didn't want to be constantly holding a key down! Okay, I'll give full mouselook a go, although having to use the console makes me feel like I'm not playing it as intended...

Ah yeah, I know that about the EOGB already - although I didn't when first playing, because I wasn't aware of that quirk (I guess it's more of a multiplayer thing), so I spent forever in that final level. I can't remember if I completed it by accident or if I just gave up. I'll put it in spoilers just in case:

Just finished the first episode - I got through that pretty quickly. My fondest memories of the game still hold up - the first appearance of the Shambler, which I felt so clever for escaping by simply running out of its arena, only to discover that it chases you through the whole level! And also the end of episode boss (Cthlon?) which is really big and impressive but isn't a bullet-sponge - you just need to flip a few switches to blast it with electricity. I took a quick look at the manual, and realised that the mix of aesthetics is half-covered by the story, which is essentially the same as DooMTM's - evil creatures from another dimension invade your future army base. It's still kind of weird that as a space-marine you start off with a shotgun and a bloody axe! I guess at some point you also go to their dimension with the churches and lava pits and stuff... Hmm, okay, I guess the story doesn't cover it, which I prefer anyway. I always thought of it as an unexplained mix, kind of like He-Man's barbarians with lasers feel. I normally look at retrospectives of these games after I've finished them, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that the mish-mash of styles was due to disagreements during development and a whole Daikatana-style RPG element being removed...

Apparently Nukem 3D was very close to including a level which heavily referenced a recent real-life shooting, so it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt on the parody stuff... Anyway, Quake is fantastic! My Twitter poll went 60-40 for mouselook, but once playing I realised that original Quake, like Dark Forces and Duke Nukem, only allowed horizontal mouselook which for me is worse than sticking to keys. So I guess I'll have to wait a few more games for full-on mouselook. Regardless, the feel of Quake is great, careening round the levels blowing enemies away. The weapons and enemies are all really well-balanced and varied - the ogres who throw grenades unless you dare get close up to them at which point they switch to chainsaw and axe, the zombies who don't die properly unless you gib them with grenades (this game really got the Romero feel of zombies right, with them slowly rising up out of the water in silhouette, shuffling towards you with groans and only becoming a problem if you stupidly let them get too close - just ignore the fact that they throw lumps of themselves at you!). I didn't think the move to 3D would make much difference without full mouselook, but it definitely makes the enemies feel more tangible and the physics of your parabolic grenades more rigid. I really like the Clive Barkery design of the enemies too, and the weird aesthetic mix between medieval and sci-fi. I had started to wonder before playing this if I had somehow missed out on the Trent Reznor/NIN music when originally playing Quake, as I remembered being disappointed and instead putting Pretty Hate Machine and Downward Spiral on loop on my stereo. Turns out that aside from about 30 seconds of menu screen music, Reznor created a soundscape rather than a thumping industrial score. So in the interests of personal authenticity, I'm playing with Spotify looping those two albums in the background and it is great.

Okay, so: -Don't use any term, unless it's actually relevant -Don't use "pre-op" (unless an op is planned?) Okay, so if it is relevant to a conversation, is "not had genital surgery" a good alternative to use? Or is there a less clunky term to use that doesn't have the implications of "pre-op"?

But we do need to know that the partner has not had genital surgery in order for the question to be asked. I understood your previous post, but now it sounds like you and dibs are saying that no one should ever mention whether anyone, including themselves, has ever had genital surgery or not...

Not sure if anyone's linked to this yet: http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/games/2015/11/stop-insulting-our-intelligence-pretending-theres-good-reason-naked-women

Well, I think the person who posed the question to GiantBomb would disagree with you.

Is there an accepted term for a trans person who hasn't had genital surgery (regardless of whether they might in the future)? Presumably post-op isn't so problematic as it doesn't imply that as strongly?