Wrestlevania

I disagree, quite strongly in fact. You see, you need to look beyond the gloss for what's really leapt forward in GTA IV: the social modeling; the way police chases work now; the seemingly-bottomless incidental details and dialogue exchanges; the massively improved gunplay and hand-to-hand systems. Try going back to something like San Andreas after you've played GTA IV for a good few hours--it's almost primitive by comparison if you ask me.

I bet Fat Rab is weeping with joy into his heavily-soiled dressing gown... Bless. Also: Which spawny bast's whacking gert telly is that?! :\ Also also: More that 30 hours played and still only scraping 60% completion?!

Worth giving it then, surely?

100% sold - thanks!

I have loaded The Darjeeling Limited onto my PSP for my imminent train journey; will report back in due course. Have been watching Firefly with Mrs V this last week and man alive... WHY didn't I start watching this sooner?! Utterly captivating.

Hah, I did exactly the same! No idea if Spaff is playing GTA IV yet or not, but almost every other Xbox contact I have was last night. Unprecedented in my experience, too. Rab's been playing since Sunday, filthy monkey. Having only discovered it this morning, I'm now certain he's going for Rockstar's "Key to the City" challenge myself... Anyway, I played for about 3hrs last night and I'm gob-smacked. Haven't time today to write up my impressions though (sorry, Miffy!). Will do this later in the week I promise. Edit: In fact, I might do this on the train on my way to Yahoo UK this afternoon...

Aaargh! That's properly shite, Marek. Yaaaay! That's properly brilliant, Marek.

Great first impression, Miffy. And thanks also for your candor with regard to even the tiniest of spoilers; I think Rockstar will have packed this GTA to the rafters with fantastic little details, rather than rewriting the whole game mechanics from scratch. Heh, thank you--too kind. I'll be giving this a run-through tonight, for a couple of hours or so as time allows. Off to London to meet Yahoo UK and learn about Fire Eagle tomorrow night though, and so won't be back until about 1:30am on Thursday morning. That would be eff-ing awesome - and I use that word very rarely. The colleague who I bought the second copy for just pointed out the 2-4 co-op modes noted on the back of the packaging.

Well, I managed to pick up a copy for both a colleague and myself. Twitter'd some thoughts whilst I was waiting in line, which I'll post up here a bit later for the sake of posterity. I also took a picture--there were loads of people queueing up last night and they sold out very quickly. I've only played the intro so far, but it certainly does look a lot better than San Andreas.

Right, looks like it's time for me to amble down t' shops. See you lot on the other side, though I can't play it tonight as I'm hanging from only 4hrs sleep, post a highly vigorous weekend. (Digging out the dozens of shrubs, bushes and small trees from the back garden, if you must know. Filthy children!)

Had no idea it was explicit; will have to make a point of not trying to sneak an hour of this into my Saturday morning routine when looking after the kids then...

I love you, toblix. But you need to chuck those shitty DVDs out if we're going to live together.

Well, what can I say? I appreciate your honesty, but it's a great film and you're clearly in need of sectioning anyway. Just sayin'...

Definitely not!

...but I really liked Cloverfield.

I notice some clever fuck has taken away the progress bar and play/pause controls from some unknown reason. Now I can't read the closing snark in the credits anymore. Fucking computer.

OH NOES!!!

Superb.

Ditto.

I'll be on for a little bit tonight (from 7pm BST) so I'll add you then.

CLARIFICATION: Verohari's an intern where I work and we play GH with a couple of others in the conference room most Friday's after work; she is far too good in far too short a period of time. (I'm also teaching her the finer points of HTML, CSS, SVN and how to bitch about the design department.) Anyway, I badgered her to read Thumbs and hop aboard.

Gods...

You'd only brick your iPod writing data to it, not streaming data from it. Because of the (fucked up) way in which music needs to be converted into one big binary stream on iPod, the writing process messes about with the file structure and therefore all sorts of 'markers' and such. So it's only going to be poorly if you interrupt the writing process--reading data is basically passive and therefore harmless, as you don't alter the physical state of the hardware in order to do it. If you are unfortunate enough to brick your iPod via a read/write cock-up, I think I'm correct in saying you have to be really unlucky for iTunes' reset functionality not to restore it (albeit with none of your music on there anymore).

Ooh, Daniel--I'm all moist!