Wrestlevania

There is, surprisingly, much to my raging spleen's disquiet. I was certain I'd taken that address myself after I first thought of it* but it's either associated with a backup email address I no longer have access to, or someone else has registered it. * Pop Fact: It's a munge of the two most prolific console franchises from my youth; WWF Wrestle Mania and Castlevania, both on the SNES.

...but the game is on it's 5th or 6th complete refit now, so anything's possible. The DNF footage shown echoes nothing of the various 2001 snippets and screenshots, which is what makes me indifferent towards it now.

I was thinking about making a Thumbs room in Lively myself, but haven't tried the program out yet--the main sticking point being that you can't have an avatar name that's already a Gmail address belonging to someone else. Which seems rather stupid to me.

Poppy-cock - it's fantastic work, Dan! That's me that posted about the cover btw.

No, I mentioned Prey because that's exactly what the footage reminded me of; glossy surfaces everywhere, lots of overbright lighting, the way the HUD overlay looks and apparently works, and that little two-legged beastie running around towards the end. I'm not slagging either game off particularly, it just doesn't appear to be what I was expecting (hoping for?) from the new Nukem. DN3D was quite toned down in its effects and settings--for aesthetic reasons, not strictly hardware ones. DNF has a towering great mutant plant type thing in one scene, all slick skin and teeth; another echo of Prey in my opinion. I'd just like to see Duke running around the streets shooting pig cops and smearing jetpack'd aliens across the outside of cinema walls again. I'm bored senseless of the obsessive outer space / space marine themes in a lot of current shooters and would like DNF to be more about present day Earth as we know it being levelled. It was my favourite thing about the original, the fact the locales were actually something you could relate to. Yes, we've run around stuff like that before, but not for a long time now--and certainly not during the current generation (as best as I can recall). Moreover, wasn't that the whole point of Duke Nukem as a character; a marauding meathead everyman superhero archetype? He could still be that in outer space, but I don't care about outer space - I want to be saving Earth as some foul-mouthed, pea-brained bulge of testosterone. I just hope 3D Realm's embraces that and doesn't squander the series' history in favour of The New Shiny-Shiny, i.e. lots of cheap visual effects facilitated by ridiculous environments.

Looks identical to Prey, but with the game assets changed. A fact which I'm sure surprises no-one.

Whoa whoa whoa, boys - puh-lease! I downloaded the demo earlier in the week and made the stupid mistake of firing it up whilst I ate my breakfast before work. I was an hour late--it's great fun! I can't understand what the problem is with the aiming system, it's lock-on based. And you can switch between targets easily. OK, the right-stick mellee combat is unconventional and somewhat automated. But it doesn't stop you causing mass carnage or performing some nifty combos. Taking down the really big hammer-wielding robots, by having to smash each piece of their armour off first and than jumping on their backs, is fun too. Just don't bother with the guns; the point of the game is chopping stuff into bits with a whacking great sword or axe. I'd say it's a cross between Mass Effect and Gears of War, but has far better combat than the former and galaxies more story and character than the latter. (I hated Gears, hugely over-rated IMO.) At least download and try it. I'd be pre-ordering this, but we Vanians are going on our annual holiday shortly (and I'm skint, as always).

Our Creative Director has that Crash Bandicoot kart racing game on his 1st-gen iPhone (which I'm swiping for free when he upgrades next week, shwing!), but it suffers horribly from very jagged graphics and some monstrous slowdown. Kiss of death for a racing game, but the tilt controls work reasonably well. You have to hold the phone reasonably flat to play it though I found, and trying to tap the screen with your right thumb to fire power-ups is a bit cack too. But the principle's there, just needs to be better coded and the accelerometer input desensitized somewhat at either end of the spectrum (i.e. central and edge deadzones).

That's so laughably shite I'm changing my avatar in its honour. It's the sort of pap I used to see at ECTS, playing away on endless loop in some dank corner of the show floor. Spectacularly arse.

...you're kidding?! Get your arse down their "flagship" Tottenham Court Road store - it's your heritage as a British gamer and an essential experience.

Subsistence is in stock at a few Computer Exchange stores. Might be worth a phone call or two.

The guy in the header graphic looks not unlike Marius in my opinion... interesting. Having played nothing contemporary on my PC now for a good while, I'm actually quite excited about the prospect of Diablo III. I just hope it follows WoW's example and doesn't have particularly demanding hardware requirements.

What can I say? Maybe Saturday was my one "good" day this year, where I don't automatically pull the head of everything even slighlty flawed out through it's exit hole.

No movies in Castle Mania last week, but Mrs V and I did watch Sunshine on Saturday night gone; brilliant. As a big fan of the under-rated Event Horizon, I thought this was excellent sci-fi horror. Not that we were expecting horror, but it made sense and worked well. I really liked the ending too--a nice metaphor for the concept of meeting your maker upon the moment of death. The soundtrack was great as well.

Bet you 0 dollars there'll be a log.txt file (or similar) in the root of the application - have a look at that.

Probably justified; Eurogamer were consummately brutal in their review of Haze. (The EG review is a bonafide critique, however.) Going to watch Yahtzee's rant now...

Yes, Mrs V and I watched it quite some time ago now in fact. Really liked it a lot; it's quite uncomfortable in just how close to DDL's character and modus operandi you get, but that's precisely what makes it a phenomenal picture in my opinion. I seem to habitually forget to post thoughts in the movies thread nowadays... For the record, we're planning to watch Sunshine and 1950's sci-fi classic The Day The Earth Stood Still (in no small part thanks to Breakbeat legend DJ Pain's astonishing album of the same name) over the course of this weekend. I'll try to remember to report back on those two some time next week.

Mmm, would have to echo the sentiment on 3:10 to Yuma; having quite looked forward to seeing that for some time, it turned out to be quite a flat and somewhat aloof movie. Not a very good Western at all.

That 3rd set is fantastic.

No. Think of the term "an ill wind" taken to silly (i.e. spontaneous suicide) levels.

Ah anime... a long-forgotten guilty pleasure. Champloo and Bebop have been on my watch list for ages, but never remember to get around to it. Loved Macross when I was a kid--and Macross Plus was chuffin' ace! Cheers for the heads up, Ginge.

Ah, OK. (I didn't bother with that hack I linked to.) I may look at picking up the full game then, possibly. I'm sure my kids would love it at any rate.

I downloaded the trial earlier and had a play about. Really should give Will Wright and crew more credit; they know they need to make Spore work well on older machines and duly the creature editor worked fine on my laptop. So I had a play about, though I'm not very creative with this sort of thing. I made a sort of hammerhead shark that walked on land, though it's a little frustrating that you can't contour and extrude surfaces to make things like fins. (It's not apparent if you can, anyway.) Then I made a monstrous alien crane fly, which looked properly nasty when it laughed. As I said, though, nothing very exciting. So I didn't save them or take any pictures. I think I'll install the trial at work too though, as my new workstation's a new Intel quad core, 4GB RAM, 8600 GTS-sporting beast of a machine. Plus I also think I'll be a little more inventive when my brains a bit more engaged...

Always mistake this for Blast Corps. It's a really bad rename and seems like a largely fruitless retail exercise. Don't think it's going to sell at all well at that price point; half that would be more like it. But why bother with the huge expense of pushing a game like this to retail in the first place? Nintendo should be driving their online retail business with this, much like Sony did with fl0w.

C'mon, use a little initiative please. Looks like a hack to add in 2/3's of the missing creature parts, not unlock the full game.