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I remember being impressed by the slickness of the BDLA trailer. Of course it didn't show any gameplay whatsoever, but I was still a little surprised that the game turned out to suck so much. Then again, for all I know they just had a production company make the trailer.

Hello, I've made a few posts already but I've been lurking for quite a long time. Not at all in a weird, stalker-like fashion, you understand. Anyway, I stumbled upon this image a while back. The thumbnail immediately stood out because I too have that mug - I went to the same primary school. I reckon I would have been in Year 4 at the start of 1993. So whose mug is it? PS So you all love me I shall now admit that Psychonauts is one of my favourite games, hooray

BBFC ratings overrule PEGI ratings, so even if PEGI rates it 18+ it will still be illegal to sell the game in the UK due to the BBFC's decision.

Congratulations on another year of avoiding death.

The problem with games is that I find it much easier to articulate what I dislike in a game than what works well. For a 'good' game, there are many factors that combine to provide the enjoyment. But as soon as you come across something annoying, it's jarring and obvious what the problem is. Hence, I have to stop myself from making posts like "game X is awesome, but with the following, detailed list of its flaws: ..." The solution is just to take the time to think about why the game is awesome, which usually makes me appreciate the game even more.

16:10 is popular for widescreen computer monitors, apparently because it is the best suited aspect ratio for fitting two A4 documents, or two pages of a document, side-by-side.

The Saturn used CD-ROMs, whereas, according to the ever-accurate Wikipedia, the N64 cartridges ranged from 4MB to 64MB. Of course, that doesn't tell us how much space typical Saturn games actually used.

Meteos is a lot of fun. It deserves as much attention as Lumines. Worms: Open Warfare on the other hand, just seemed... wrong. Super Mario 64 DS is surprisingly playable if you haven't played the N64 version. I never played it on the N64 so I'm very glad I corrected that error and completed it on the DS. Definitely a game to play before you die. (But the controls were unwieldy enough that I'd recommend playing it on the N64 or Wii VC if possible).

Returning to Fable 2, Molyneux markets these concepts so well, and entices us to believe that the dog will have this incredible new emergent behaviour, when all we've seen is a 5 minute demo. The dog behaviour we've seen looked very realistic for the most part, but I suspect that Molyneux is subtly leading us to believe that the dog's actions in the demo are just a fraction of what it will do in full game. But the jaded, cynical gamer in me worries that we've actually seen all there is to see with the dog, and the fact that it is just a simple state machine will be painfully obvious to any player after playing the game for more than 15 minutes. I would gladly be proved wrong. Also, as a technical sort of person, I have a tendency to dis-believe the sorts of woolly statements about the AI that get thrown out to the masses. I'm vaguely aware of the sort of problems which are inherent in creating an AI, so I suspect that the dog AI won't be much different from AI in other games, there will just be more rules controlling the behaviour. I have a similar scepticism towards the hyperbolic promises made about Assassin's Creed.

Having Steam or Steam-like DRM won't be sufficient to stop pirating, as evidenced by piracy of HL2: the DRM was the only online component of the game, so when that was broken there was nothing missing from the game. Pirating a game like WoW, however, is pointless. If you can't authenticate with Blizzard's servers, then running around a world on your own won't appeal to many people. The idea of an adventure game with an online, multi-player component sounds intriguing...

It seems clear that in Valve's case, they built their own engine because it was the best way of achieving what they wanted with Half-Life 2. Certainly the sales of HL2 alone will have easily covered the development costs, so they didn't need to license the engine. But since it existed, why not? Perhaps the same applies to Crytek and the others? I would bet that Gears of War alone has repaid the development costs of UE3. If we're talking about Source Engine games then let's not forget Vampire TM:B, and there are the upcoming commercial sequels to Natural Selection and They Hunger.

This game has me hooked. I took out the Volk in just two sittings. It will be interesting to see how long my interest will hold now that I'm just collecting orbs (~50 agility left to go, but ~200 hidden left to go). But the ending! I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.