Wrestlevania

“Ahhh, fresh meat!!” ........./ Welcome, SignorSuperdouche.

Fuck me, I was expecting "big" but 3.2GB--for a demo?!

Spending all of tomorrow in a conference, so may be carrying my brain around in a bucket by 9pm tomorrow night. I'll definitely be up for Thursday night's session though.

Great show again, loved the wizard song and the Diablo II poop anecdotes. Also the Far Cry 2 discussion, about how best to sell the "Slow Burn Holy Fuck-titude" of a game. Also, the way you ended this episode was superb - very slick and was a natural close.

Cops & Robbers definitely requires a low/zero "Twat Count" for it to be fun. That's not to say everyone must shoot and drive perfectly, but both teams have to make a good attempt at their goals for it to be really fun.

I'm planning to start on series 4 this week, but I'm thinking of holding off so I can goad Mrs V into watching the original series. This constant recollection of the older episodes is really compelling.

And..? You're welcome to continue playing with strange foreign types while the rest of us Europeons are at work if you'd rather.

I tried to download the demo this morning before leaving for work, just before 7am GMT, and the demo hadn't been unlocked for the sweaty masses yet. I'll try again tonight, but I expect it'll be a fairly hefty beast. So I probably won't be playing until tomorrow night.

I've got James Zabiela's 4.4 Part Four [MP3, 160MB] in heavy rotation at the moment--subtle and superb. I think everyone should listen to something like this at least once. Marek: This is a kick-arse down tempo Progressive mix! Best I've picked up in the last couple of months.

Fruity! Cheers, Norfolk. Would anyone care to guess how it might run on my sagging desktop, based on the scientific absolute that Episode One runs "fairly smoothly" on decent settings and at a modest res (i.e. 1,024 by 768)?

20 + 1... Hmm... I'd like to hereby change the meaning of "GMT" to "Get Me Toblix!"

You posted the above at 9:45am GMT. So now you have a yardstick and no excuses!

Argh! Canst you not furnish one's abode with a dirty great piece of ethernet..?

Thursday sounds good. What sort of time (GMT) is good for those interested? Anywhere between 8pm and 11pm would be fine for me.

Well, I've got my 360 back now - and the UK's back on GMT again - so I'm definitely up for a Grand Thumbs Auto night...

Clickteam were the people who originally developed Klick and Play. They now make Multimedia Fusion, which gets (very positively) cited quite frequently in Video game design prototyping circles I believe. If Project Boku comes off as being a modern, 3D version of what Klick and Play was trying to achieve, it could be seriously good. Especially if Microsoft augment the game with regular feature updates and a decent community system. Could be massive, in fact...

The Wire is set in and around Baltimore and there are five seasons in total, of twelve episodes each. I've watched seasons 1-3 so far and cannot recommend it highly enough.

Looks like a 3D version of Klick and Play from way back in the mid 90s. I don't like those weird uni-motorcycle avatars at all, but the pixellated landscapes are certainly charming. The overly-elaborate water shader also seems total overkill and in start contrast the pixellation of the landscape. Does look fun though. Those demo clips suggest to me that Project Boku is about specifically creating arena games; you get a fixed space and then populate with whatever you like--race track, platforming, shooting, etc. This seems in subtle contrast to LBP's more Incredible Machine-like gameplay to me.

Finished watching Generation Kill last night--very good series, well worth your time. And, incidentally, by the same writing team as The Wire. :tup: Started watching Charlie Brooker's Dead Set this lunchtime, as I missed it when it was on telly last week. I'm stunned; for a TV serial on a non-mainstream channel, the production quality is brilliant. The whole "TV's prime audience are zombies" premise is as deliberate as it is obvious. But it doesn't feel patronizing to me--not in the first episode anyway. And make no mistake: Brooker intimately knows his source material, which makes Dead Set feel just like any notable modern zombie flick I can think of. More than that, it feels considerably superior to Romero's pathetic Diary of the Dead already. Very much looking forward to watching the rest of the series, although I'm a little disappointed that the remaining 4 parts are only half the length of the first installment.

So I started again last night, with a brand new character. I changed my SPECIAL choices slightly this time and also picked much better skills for the long term too. I do have one major gripe, however: after escaping vault 101 I spent about 20 minutes rummaging through the ruined town immediately outside the vault entrance. And the fucking game froze on my after a good round of scavenging. I hadn't saved since immediately exiting the vault either. It's also extremely frustrating that this is only the second time I've switched my (brand new) 360 on since it came back from Microsoft on Monday, and the bastard thing locked up. No lights, but it's a "failure" (in the form of a software crash) anyway.

I decided to riff with the zombie horde idea on my blog.

The I Am Legend mode would fit in perfectly, too, I think. Especially if it was a more long-term gameplay mode, with a clear end game you could complete missions to work towards. Chuck in some sort of mechanic to drive this, like a "humanity metre", and you'd have quite a compelling game in its own right I reckon. Excellent suggestion... but will we ever see any of this I wonder?

Lets wait and see what PC mod fraternity can turn out in the new year. Imagine being chased into one of those Broker tenement blocks in the first part of the game by a horde of zombies. How much fun would it be to have to retreat up those stairs inside, firing into a seething crowd of blood-thirsty undead, still having to watch every side as you ascended in case a shambler came out of one of the apartments on the level you just got to and attacked you from behind? For all Left 4 Dead's ambition, it's not going to be on the sort of scale as modern day Liberty City. The play scope is epic and 90% of the work is already done. It's a question of planning the new game mode(s*) and further developing the AI. * Not only could you have a straight up multiplayer sandbox game, the high score opportunities would be immense--both multi- and single-player: Longest sole survivor Longest surviving group Most kills in 10 minutes (group and single-player) Most RTAs (running down zombies) ...the list could go on and on, without too much additional work beyond what we already have in GTAIV.

Erk, I wasted nearly a dozen people making my exit... Edit: Argh, dammit! Too annoyed at myself for the inadvertent rampage now. So, in true Fallout fashion, I'm going to reroll my character and start again--instantly making this a perfect Fallout conversion for me.