infovore

In other news: 21h33, holy shit, that's some game. Loved it to be despite a few niggles I probably ought to write about. Now going around a second time with female Infiltrator started afresh (as opposed to male Soldier imported).

Sorry I missed this, chaps - was out. Not sure I'm around next week either, which is a bummer; might turn up for it later. (Also: I've only just discovered the multiplayer forum - I wasn't logged into the site for ages. Idiot.)

Yes, quite a few. Mainly two-player stuff - it's hard to summon a big crowd that know the rules - but there's lots of good stuff out there. Highlights include: Knizia's Lost Cities, which is a brilliantly simple two-player game that's very fast, and a great way to get people into boardgaming Blue Moon, also by Knizia, which is a take on the CCG that removes "collectable": instead, each deck represents a single race, and the decks never merge; the game is perfectly balanced even though each deck plays totally differently. I really love this - it's a fast two-player game with push-pull scoring, and each deck totally changes the match-ups. Also, the main game plus every deck is only going to get you back about £50-60, and that's a lot of game. The Catan card game. Not really a card game - it takes up vast amounts of table - but designed for two and two alone, and I like it more than Catan itself; there's more strategy around buildings attached to cities, and the expansions are all brilliantly thematically designed. Carcassone, obviously, because it's about making the board 1960: The Making of the President was my surprise highlight of last year. A two-player strategy game about refighting the Kennedy-Nixon election? Hell yes. Turns out it's bloody brilliant, and has some wonderful mechanics - notably, the bag of cubes for probability, meaning that the more influence a player has on the board, the less likely they'll win any probability test. Anyhow, basically: I like boardgames lots. These are some of the ones I'd recommend to people, but I'll also bang on about backgammon for at least ten minutes if pushed...

It's not a narrative sequel. It's better than that! It is, if you will, the DOA Xtreme Beach Volleyball to Fallout 3's DOA. Yup, it's post-apocalyptic casino minigames the whole family can enjoy.

"This game will [EXCLUSIVE IGN INSIDER CONTENT! REGISTER NOW!]" - IGN Insider

"There's nothing normal about THIS normal mapping." - IGN.com

"This game will rip out your rectum and leave it hanging like a little weiner" - IGN.com "This game will blow you like your sister blew me." - IGN.com "This game puts the 'game' in 'awesome motherfucking game'" - IGN.com "This game won't just make you shit the bed, it'll make you shit through your bed into the bed of whoever lives below you." - IGN.com "Away. Blown. Do the math." - IGN.com "Every Gamestop employee will be performing clean-up in aisle three when you see this game" - IGN.com

Hello - wonder if anyone has any invites going?

Loved the brief section on IMUSE, and whilst it was obviously great in the adventures, I always felt it really found its home in X-Wing and TIE Fighter; the emergent music in them was bloody perfect, and neatly hit the sweet-spot of computers' inbuilt MIDI soundlibraries being just about good enough to really sell the extensions of John Williams' score. I would have love to have heard it through an AWE32, though.

As long as you don't knock the camera control, the Dead Space menus are pretty unobtrusive; the projection of them (and all readouts from all screens) into the gameworld is more for consistency than for distraction. If you're not careful, the standard angle it appears at when you hit back/select doesn't really reveal what's really going on; you have to fiddle to see the shiny, as it were.

Dirt is nice, but personally I think the spatial typography in Grid is a lot better; highlights include the flight down the grid at the start, and some of the stuff in the garage. Can't find any examples right now, but if you've played it, you'll know what I mean. Of course, the top trump of embedding UI in the environment right now is Dead Space, which doesn't so much do it with text as with the entire fricking UI. Which is a nice way of stopping you from pausing the game to recombine herbs and reload... oh, wait.

Hullo. I'm me. You might know me from blogs such as http://infovore.org or alternatively you might not. I know a couple of peeps here - Nachimir and Wrestlevania, for sure.