Nachimir

It'll be some time before I have enough spare to get to Jerusalem, but I asked my housemate, who's played 6 of the nine assassinations so far, and he says his copy does fine when he's at the bureau in Jerusalem. We're playing on a 60GB Euro PS3 that was bought secondhand this summer. Not sure if the firmware is updated or not.

Sounds fucked, but might be worth swapping out with a cheap/old graphics card just to make sure it isn't the mobo. Could also be overheating if the cooler has been knocked. FWIW, I have a passively cooled 6600 too (Gigabyte? Blue card with a gold heatpipe, it was a good deal at the time, but...), and even the non-passively cooled 6600s were renowned for being a bit crap and unstable. A bunch of cards only worked when the standard fans were replaced with something better. I've not heard awful things about the heatpipe versions, but no 6600s are exactly brilliant - Until some new drivers came out a few months ago, mine had perpetual driver/stability issues that would cause my system to reboot if things got too intense.

Bizarrely, I'm actually quite liking the chavs now, but only at arms length. They're aggressive, status obsessed little fucks who later become equally status obsessed, beefy, bruised motherfuckers. As such, they appropriate every single obnoxious status symbol society has and corrupt it. One of the poorest, roughest estates in Nottingham has a main road that connects to the city, and every saturday it gives a trickle of garishly done out hire limos full of screaming hen parties and priapic stag dos. This I like: Openly obnoxious people normalising obnoxious things. If they can't buy it they'll rent it, and even things out of their price range, like expensive champagne, get appropriated by their celebrity heroes... who in turn are catering to their market of chavs (Edit: Burberry, for one, are quite pissed off. Since chavs appropriated it, the amount of their products using the fabric have dropped from 50% to around 5% ) I think the middle class pissing competitions I had to see as a kid will be irrevocably changed now. No more equivalent to early nineties dads wandering out in the garden to show off a new cordless phone to the neighbors... street wide new car competitions won't go away, but some of that kind of thing will just be seen as chavvy. I hope In fact, I suspect the whole "keeping up with the Joneses" thing about middle class Britain is one of the cultural roots of chavness, and was ripe for combination with the fronting of American R&B culture in the late '90s and early '00s. Nathan Barleys aren't nearly so widespread in the UK (They're in London and Bristol mostly, as far as I can tell, and are likely to spread to other meeja hubs like Manchester if they haven't already), but at the moment they seem to get laughed at a lot further north.

I can imagine... There was one on a coach I took a few weeks ago, and he even managed to slip a "That's just how I roll, that's just how I roll" into his loud, obnoxious, never-ending phone conversation. I used to seethe at them, but since watching Nathan Barley I can only laugh

Do the BBC still have the series online, or do I have to resort to youtube etc.? I've had a fish around the BBC and google; seems like the latter.

I am liking the series. It shows him as an obnoxious prick, while also showing other characters hating him but selling out.

I think Rodi is right on the money. Give it another year and the PS3 will most likely be fantastic, but for now 360 is king. Sony just halved the cost of dev kits, and maybe that will tempt more developers, but it's not much compared to the full development costs of a game like Assassin's Creed. Things could get "interesting" with so much publisher money flooding toward Wii and DS.

I was long a fan of TVGoHome, especially Cunt. It got made into a TV series called Nathan Barley: 9 minutes: "I'm a self-facilitating media node"

I've not seen the 360 version, but the PS3 colours shown here are pretty close to what I see. So it seems the colour saturation and contrast are indeed lower on the PS3. As far as I can tell, there isn't less detail though, it just looks that way because of the difference in palette. The models appear identical, and if they were using lower resolution textures it'd be way more obvious.

Spilt screen Supercars 2 on the Amiga with my brother. The truly cheesy intro video there is worth watching. A pirated version of Harrison Ford + "Just look at these super car super scores" (The little bit of orchestral music was also used at the start of the Fully Ramblomatic review of Fable).

I kind of accept the as a rationale for the more game-like elements of it, like the hiding places. Also, every time I'm in one of those I feel like singing. After a few hours and the first mission done, I'm still having fun and thinking it doesn't quite deserve the big "meh" it's getting. Also, parry kills make the combat a lot faster - it *is* pretty dull at first. That makes me wonder if it's deliberately designed that way to incentivise people to avoid it? If so, terrible decision, they should have just made it so you get butchered face to face against two or more people. It's very strange that they circle you and take turns when that many people could easily just dice you - though I suppose it's yet another strange game world thing conveniently rationalised away by the thing. Oath, I'm playing it on a PS3 and will take a look at that when I get to Jerusalem. So far, there is a lot of screen tearing if I'm looking at a whole city.

Valve have just put the stats for this online: http://steamgames.com/status/ep2/ep2_stats.php There's a tab for the achievements too, just like in the personal stats on Steam. Around 1 percent did the gnome thing, and only 0.4 obsessive enough to squash all the grubs Particularly interesting are the heatmaps showing where people died the most. Like the big red blob on this one where, it appears, lots of people didn't make the bridge jump: http://steamgames.com/status/ep2/death_maps/ep2_outland_06_deaths.jpg

I've played it for a few hours now, it's fairly enjoyable. Rodi is right, the animations are very impressive. AI is nothing really amazing (though none ever is really), but this is a great progression on the ilk of thief games. It's getting a bit dull at this point, but that's most likely because I've been noodling around getting all the lookout points rather than getting on with the missions. My housemate is a bit further on, and has picked up more abilities that seem to make combat a bit more interesting.

Try telling them/asking them about that the next time they knock on your door. Really, you'll probably get some pretty good laughs out of it.

My Jehovah's Witness mother was convinced that anything with ghosts in it was demonic and would invite the forces of Satan into our house. Also, The A-Team was apparently too violent After being raised like that, I left in my teens because Jehovah's Witnesses are too fuckheaded. So yeah, I'm looking forward to Ghostbusters

That sucks Adfegg. If you really want an Altair figure, I saw a couple of sizes of it for sale on play.com the other day, thought it sounds like you might want to shop somewhere else.

I'm really looking forward to this given that I was forbidden from watching the films as a kid. Thanks for posting the video Dan.

Thank you, that video delighted an entire room full of people playing DS games last night

Don't sweat it, we just seem churlish and xenophobic Welcome Dr. Gash., you're doing pretty well so far Idle Thumbs is easily one of the best gaming forums I've found, in that it isn't a mess of giant republican/democrat/christian/atheist debate threads mixed with spam, pictures of guns and pictures of hot women. It's a literate gaming forum instead

As my brother said when he first played Far Cry: "There's something really nice about strolling down a beach shooting people in the face" I'm tempted to build a new gaming desktop, given that I really, really want to play this and I'm going to be modding UTIII too. My present one is creaking along at the very, very bottom of Crysis' system requirements :/

Last night a friend and I conceived a TV series where horrible things happen to horrible celebrities, such as Michael Winner. Robber/Surgeon/Rapist/Masked man in promo: "Calm down Michael, it's just a commercial".

CHAERG it's Jericho.

Fable: The Lost Chapters is really worth a go, it's beautiful. I think I enjoyed it more than most because I avoided any and all hype over it.

GDC is happening in February

We love you Joanna. And if it comforts you any, my housemate told me a really funny story about ginger people today. He was on some voluntary scheme or other where they were working with primary school age children, and at some point they were all looking at a ginger cat and talking about it. He said: "Do you know why some cats are ginger?" "No." "Fleas are orange and really tiny, and ginger cats basically have so many of them that they cover all of their hair and make them look that colour." "My friend [Roger] at school has ginger hair, does he have fleas?" "Yes, all ginger people have fleas".