Wrestlevania

You can 'whitelist' Thumbs to allow their ads through though...

*ahem* It's in hand, trust me. There's just a slight kink preventing rollout of (hopefully) reCAPTCHA, but Marek's seeing to it.

Sneakers made from WoW gold, though...

A simple analogy would be how snugly this cactus would fit in your rectum, were I ever fortunate enough to catch you. You auto-sliming bastards!

I think this is more about shifting thinking. If you're conscientious enough to be creating passwords that much stronger, you're likely to start routinely combing your system for security risks (like keyloggers) too. While we're on the subject of better, more managable passwords, I'd like to point people in the direction of the SuperGenPass bookmarklet - it's dead clever and really handy.

Mine's on a shelf in the TV cabinet, lying on its side by its self. (My Dreamcast and GameCube occupy the shelf below.) I pulled the back off the cabinet to allow maximum air flow, as we used to have a 'backed' TV cabinet and the 360 would boil in there. Fortunately, I can play it with this cabinet's doors shut without risk of overheating, which is nice as it blocks out a lot more of that turbine racket. I used to have my 360 standing vertical before, too, but I'm finding I get a lot fewer 'disc unreadable' errors now. Granted, it still happens occasionally - an it's definitely specific to particular games (Forza 2 and GTA IV being the prime culprits) - but the machine seems happier on its side overall. I reckon the only thing you could do to improve cooling on a stock 360, i.e. not ripping it's guts out and adding a liquid cooling system, would be to have it on its side but with 1" blocks under each foot. This would really improve air flow and likely drop the machine's temperature a good few degrees. I've been thinking about fashioning a couple of wooden rails to go on the cabinet shelf just for this, then spray painting them the same colour as the cabinet so they blend in a bit better. Anyway, I've had mine for about 18 months now, too, and it's a little bit twitchy at times. No red lights or anything yet* but the hardware does sound rather grumpy at times... * "Touch wood, touch wood you stupid fuck!"

Eurogamer's recent Fallout 3 preview makes for considerably more grim reading than the PC Zone sales pitch: Having read Eurogamer's piece, I simply can't believe PC Zone actually spent 5 hours playing the same code. There's arguably more meat from Eurogamer's 30 minute hands-on than anywhere in PC Zone's article. I know you hate the pre-emptive shoeing, Miff, but it's really not looking good at this point...

I've just read through the whole thing, as salesy as it was, and to be honest I'm not really any more aware of what the game holds for the player. There's no revelation in there, it's all stuff you could basically make an educated guess at. If anything, the constant - and seemingly unavoidable? - comparisons to Oblivion (in terms of gameplay mechanics, environment and characters) leaves me a bit cold. I didn't like Oblivion, as much as I tried to. Wandering around "exploring" sounds like it might be quite distracting, potentially. But the way PC Zone have pitched it, it sounds like an excuse for Bethesda to push you out into the world and leave you there. For me, one of the worst things about Oblivion was that the game fundamentally consisted of "go in this direction, but we won't really tell you how far it is or how long it will take you to get there; and we'll throw in a metric fuck-tonne of niggling distractions and sub-plots along the way." This sort of experience in a game leaves me bewildered, confused and aggravated. It just isn't fun to my mind and strikes me as tackling the problem of poor story-telling by hiding it under a mountain of story. I don't want to spend hours and hours just wandering around; entertain me!

Not wishing to give attention to lesser projects, but I'm dubious about Ghostbusters ever being released now. It's already been snatched away from its original developer, for one reason or another (some citing serious quality concerns). It could well be one that doesn't see the light of day as the project stands now. I believe it was also not going to be ready until summer 2009 at the earliest. It could be much later or not at all now, regardless of the original film cast's voice talent involvement.

Did you notice there was almost no effort in the gun animations either? No apparent recoil on the combat shotgun for example, despite the mega-blast sound effect when you fired it. (I was also quite angry that the guy demo'ing the game picked one of the shittiest perks - Bloody Mess - in order to show off the game. Really stupid and completely the wrong message to be sending about Fallout as a game. And, in a sick way, I can see this being the summing up of reviews of the finished game: "a bloody mess.") However, speaking of sound effects, it seems apparent that Bethesda are currently using a lot of audio samples as place-holders for now, ripped straight from the first two games. This might be an indication of how much we've yet to see and, perhaps, how much earlier the code demonstrated was than where they might be now. The game launches in a matter of weeks now and I can't believe this is what we'll be getting. But it's so far from what I was expecting that it makes me really nervous as to just what we'll be given.

I'm not surprised they dropped Brütal Legend to be honest; bean-counters want what they know sells (i.e. sandbox games), not something original. Especially when the financial pinch is on. What does surprise me, however, is that they didn't plump for milking the Ghostbusters franchise--I would've thought that was money in the bank myself. Very odd. I sincerely hope Shit in the Sand never surfaces again, but there's so much financial interest in whoring out 50 Cent at every available opportunity that it's bound to reappear sooner or later.

Inspired by B3TA's quizzes, obviously. [nsfw]

Heh, thanks Rodi! It seems very difficult to organise a trip out at work now there are so many of us. Also, some have now seen it already and would like to again, but can't agree on an evening when they're next free. So fuck them, I'm off.

And everyone in Gears is overtly "metro" anyway, which is nice and trendy. The Duke's just a meat-headed pig. Here's a nice idea, though: Duke Nukem Brain Training! "Tits, ass, ass, tits..."

Right, I've resolved to see it on my own this evening. Otherwise I'll never get to see it on the big screen. Billy No-Mates am I, but this is in the name of Art, dammit!

Idle Thumbs “Pulling up videogaming’s rocks and peering underneath since 2005*.” * Or thereabouts.

You can still do positional fixing with the first-generation iPhone and Touch though. And that's all you really need, even if you need to hit a button every time. Besides, you're not allowed to take iterative, successive fixes on the iPhone 3G - it's explicitly stated in the developer Ts&Cs. Speculation is that allowing turn-by-turn precision would completely drain battery power in a very short period of time. So, in theory, Colors would be possible on any version of the iPhone/Touch. You'd just load the game, tap* to take a fix, then start playing. That experience would be quite so silky smooth, but it certainly wouldn't be a complete ball-ache either. * I'm not sure you could build in auto-fix functionality when an application starts as I've not read into the dev guide(s) yet.

It's like ships in the night in here now...

Yes. No. It was the whole "hairy bloke dancing around like a loon" thing that made me think of the venerable Mr Florence.

I'm planning to see it next week too, otherwise I'll likely miss it in the cinema altogether--we're off to France for a fortnight next Sunday.

Vivabit's @media Ajax conference. I signed up yesterday afternoon, but need to sort out somewhere to stay.

I've been promised our Creative Director's 1st-gen iPhone when he upgrades some time shortly, so I'll look forward to playing these. Never played Monkey Ball on any system, so is this as good a starting point as any? What impresses me most, about the potential for the iPhone as a games platform, is that I'm consistently hearing it's at least comparable to the PSP in terms of technology. And developers I know have been saying this since the first version launched, nevermind that you can now throw GPS into the bargain too. It'd be great to see something as ambitious and fun-sounding as the Gizmondo's Colors realized at last. Exciting times indeed.

bit Generations!

I had a look at the video Ben linked to in the OP, which is where I got the 'grappling hook' impression from. PixelJunk seems to be an on-going theme/series of experimental games on PSN, correct? Reminds me a little bit of Nintendo's late efforts on the Game Boy, with that series of minimalist titles right at the end of the Advance's lifespan. (The name escapes me now...)

Not quite sure I understand what's going on here--is it a multiplayer grappling hook game??!