infovore

You can pretty much always get a spaceship up and running with the mats on a planet: you only need working launch thrusters and pulse drive to get into orbit - just like the ship you start with. The last ship I salvaged - the location of which I found through {GAME_MECHANIC} - became a huge project - I could have all this extra space, if I was willing to abandon a charged hyperdrive, and fix so many of its core components. I ended up managing - through a combination of stuff I had on me and foraging - to get the engines and lasers back online. All the modifications were going to require fixing later, once I had space to craft stuff, and more Thamium9 from a trip mining asteroids. I ended up kicking the launch thrusters into life and flying out to the nearest space station with no shields; fixed the shields in orbit once I'd mined a pile of Thamium, and over the next half hour, brought the upgraded systems online whilst I did a few chores. It was great when it all worked out, though. I'm hugely enjoying this - somewhere between the excitement of survival and the chill of just coasting. And the colours. It's fulfilling all my Peter Elson/Chris Foss dreams.

You won't. Plutonium - which is what the launch thrusters require - is super plentiful. I've never had to walk more than a minute for it - and when you find the red crystals that can be mined for it, you get tonnes. It's easy to think "oh, I'm stuck!" and then realise what you really mean is "that plutonium is really far", where you've decided really far is >60s walk. When in fact... those planets are big. It does discourage constant in/out of spaceship hopping - you tend to orbit looking for a good base of operations - but don't be too precious about it. You'll also slowly get a knack for recognising the things that are the same the galaxy over - various mineral deposits, crystals, etc.

The new season of BM is promising to be great - last year's Superbowl episode is pretty special, and this year began with some serious legwork on Madden 2015. It has a habit of making me snort with laughter at work, though, which isn't always appropriate... Oh, there's a new one out. Better read that at somepoint, then. And you're all spot on about how readable they are, even if you don't like sports! Bois' timing is cracking. As, incidentally, is his pitch-perfect use of animated gifs - he's done the legwork on video capture, too). More gifs in games articles, people.

Whoever set up the Authentic 56k Modem Lag® should be proud of themselves. Sorry I had to shoot, but that was fun! Especially more reliance on the Gauntlet/LagFist than I've ever seen...

ugh I'm clearly going to have to write my own "switch to better" script.

I'm in. I like Q3 a lot. (also it is ages since I've been about here, sorry).

Now is, as usual, the time to point out that if you'd like a half-decent Aliens game, Wayforward's Aliens: Infestation for the DS is great. Platformy-Metroidvania Aliens game; very good, and lovely animation.

What made me love that screengrab even more is that it manages to be a Phaedrus reference for fans of the show and a neat Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance riff. Touché, Fullbright company.

Oh, I'm not saying you should write from cover to cover, in linear order. I guess what I was disappointed by is that the break-point in the tales is, essentially, completely arbitrary. The overlaps in theme and narrative between them are all carefully structured, planned in, absolutely - that's the whole point. But the actual point in the story where that page gives up and becomes a new tale (before unravelling later)... was basically just a case of snipping the individual stories in two, wherever. Again, I just felt there were perhaps more interesting structural things to do - even though, of course, a lot of the overlaps are much longer-running within the texts. (But; I would say this, because that's the sort of thing I like; insert banging on about BS Johnson here). It's not a major criticism; it was just disappointing to feel like he seemed a bit uninterested in that structural flourish.

Well - it might not be as huge a thing as you're expecting, but I suddenly became swept away pretty much from when the ruler snaps (you'll see) to the final word. The control there is incredible.

I really can't recommend Black Swan Green enough. Cloud Atlas is lovely, yes, but I kind of hated number9dream at the time - the cod-Murakami sections drove me nuts. But there's this lovely simplicity to BSG: a hint of autobiography, a hint of fantasy, an interesting overlap into Cloud Atlas / Mitchellverse; and some remarkable structure. Mitchell explains each chapter as a short story, about a month, and they do all join together into a novel, but also hang together alone well. And yet he ramps the pace in such a gentle way that the final couple of chapters build to an unexpected crescendo. It was so simple, so unshowy, and I love it for that. (I was bitterly disappointed when he explained that Cloud Atlas was never written out-of-order; he simply wrote the seven sections, and literally just hit cut/paste to shift them around. The final literal structure of that book was done in a couple of minutes. I know it was always intended, but I was disappointed that the cuts were, essentially, almost arbitrary).

Yeah, I do miss the "straight" approach of A2, but A3 isn't bad. The carving is nice. (And I'll admit, I quite enjoyed the Colonotronic Arts subplot).

I really enjoyed the demo. Or rather: I really enjoyed the mountains and the carving and the snow. I really don't like the crazy OTTness of it. And then I realised what I just really want is Amped 4. I'm a huge devotee of the franchise - mainly the first two, to be fair - and gosh, that was just lovely to carve down mountains and make beautiful tricks. But SSX might have to fill that niche for the time being.

Just another quick shout for Warrior Within. The tone is horrible, the combat overblown, and the whole nu-metal Prince thing is terrible. But: the platforming is really good, when it's good. The Water Tower and Mechanical Tower, for instance, are fantastic - the best kind of POP verticality, building on the platforming that came towards the end of Sands Of Time. Made me super happy, just climbing these huge vertical things... and then I had to fight things, which made me grumpy. So, you know, if you can tolerate all the stuff that really is as bad as everyone says, there's a bunch of stuff in it that really builds upon Sands of Time. (SOT is still the best, and my favourite, by a long way. Don't worry, I'm not crazy.)

"You have no dignity!" Hello! I have a copy of this, a Hori EX2, an Xbox and some slightly bad RSI when I play too much. My gamertag is PalefaceX. I like Abel, Sagat, Ryu, Dudley, and Ibuki. I like this game a lot.

I have not got very far, but can tell you that it is bollocking hard, and that all that grinding is probably very necessary.

Well, Peter Molyneux thinks it's "a glimpse of the future of video games", though he's pulled a Jake and not exactly finished it or anything:

Tweetie on the phone. Tweetie on the desktop. Both are excellent.

It's dead good - not cheap, as Nachimir says, but it really does work like it says. Also, though you can send them PDFs, their online tool is lovely for simpler, text-based papers. It's not really designed for single issues like Lulu - they're newspapers, not books, so longer print runs make more sense and really bring the cost down - but the results are great. There's something special about newsprint. (Disclaimer - they're good friends, and they work next door).

Hello! I'm PalefaceX and usually around in evenings, GMT. Perfect Dark: sounds fun. New thread?

boring question, and I apologise in advance for not reading entire scrollback: anybody playing this on 360?

oh, yeah, Rogue. That was one of my other first games, and I played it regularly for years and years and years. Never got near the amulet - usually down to about level 13/14 of the dungeon - but god it was good. If you've not played Rogue, ever: play Rogue. Skip Nethack, skip ADOM, skip Angband, just play plain old simple Rogue. There's a nice iPhone version. It's awesome. And it's why I like Diablo. (Not because of loot).

Both are correct; CGA only has four colours, but there are two potential palettes: white/cyan/magenta/black and black/red/yellow green. Here you go! Anyhow: the first games I really recall playing were BBC ports on my cousins' Acorn Electron . We got a 286-10 in 1989, when I was 7, and the first proper games I devoted genuine amounts of time to would be and and many hours flying around Lake Michigan and the Bay Area in Seriously. I was a total sim dork from an early age, and as I got older, got into less and less realistic sims - though 1942:PAW is the last great one I played, and Aces of the Deep will always be superb - and am now a die-hard console gamer. (I played on friends' consoles, but it would be years before I owned my own. I have played much catch-up since my teenage years).

Not sure it is, really: the biggest leap other species have is innate biotic powers. Beyond that: it's made quite clear that pretty much every species in the universe has stumbled on Prothean technology, and that's how the great leap forward happened. The asari just happened to get there first, that's all - they've had 2000 years of dicking around with the Mass Relays and the Citadel. Granted, they might have had neater spaceships when they found their first Prothean tech... but the long and the short of it - and one of the key themes of the trilogy imho - is that every race in the ME universe has had some kind of "great leap forward", based upon Prothean technology. I like how near future the game is - it's a reminder of just how colossal the influence of mass effect technolgoy is - but humans are just the most recent race to make that leap, not the only ones.

Also, with the flamethrower dudes - aim for their tanks and then just get out of there. They will blow up quite quick once they're leaking fuel, even though their health will not go down until the tank goes up. Of course, then it'll go down nice and quick.