James

"Will he finally start taking things seriously and actually help us, or will he keep on jumping around with a frying pan like a tit?" The tension was palpable. I palped it.

I can imagine jump packs being pretty handy. I'm forever using the charge ability to keep the enemy scattered and on their arses.

It looks like I might be out tomorrow evening, probably from a little after seven, so if we could start nearer six that would be good for me. Since you all obviously want the best for me, I'm sure we're in agreement. Six o'clock sharp it is, then. OK? Great.

Finally, what split-screen PC gaming has been waiting for! You and a twelve-fingered friend can make full use of all of your digits, and still have four keys left over convenient forehead access!

I welcome the 50% frequency of episodes. For 50% of long may it continue. By which I mean I'm glad it's not less frequent. Not the opposite. Of course, I shouldn't derive a trend from two episodes. It could be months before the next The Idle Thumbs Podcast. What a fool I'd look then. I dare not entertain the thought.

Yeah, that's the exact same button combination I kept having trouble with. I could run diagonally right but not left. It was stupid. I think batches of keys share lines that can only take a certain number of inputs at a time. I haven't seen that in a while, though. I'd assumed it was a thing of the past.

Law and medicine? You're like some kind of qualifications machine!

Sounds probably good.

I agree with all of that. While I enjoy my vaguely swish mouse, I personally don't really see the point in fancy gaming keyboards -- standard keyboards have more than enough keys; crucially, far more than I can easily reach with one hand, so adding to that seems redundant. I guess things could be arranged a little more efficiently, but you can always shift your WASD over to the right if you want more keys to the left, which Wikipedia tells me some people do. Since keyboards stopped throwing a beepy fit when confronted with more than two key-presses at a time, I can't think of anything important missing from the bog standard models. Other than standard layout. I can't stand how every manufacturer seems to think they know better and that what I really need is for my backslash key to be on the outside of my right shift key. After getting fed up with my pointlessly wireless keyboards running out of batteries, I went out and bought a no-frills £4 keyboard, and it served me far better. Actually, I tell a lie: it had three extra buttons for launching browsers and e-mail and something else, but they were tucked neatly between the arrow keys and the block above it. I never used them, but they didn't take any extra space and they didn't get in the way. When, a couple of years later, I spilled water all over it and killed it, I went to the exact same shop and bought the exact same £4 keyboard, only this time they'd changed the logo and added that shiny circular recess that Windows keys seem to have these days. It was the last one and the box was slightly torn, which made it seem even more dodgy and cheap, to my amusement. But it does the job. Four pounds probably isn't even especially cheap for what I got, but it's better than paying ten times that for irrelevant crap. This story is rubbish. The point is that I'm fine with cheap keyboards.

So, should we organize a thing, or do we prefer to ambush each other with invitations on the spur of the moment?

I don't generally do anything with my Sundays, so I could probably manage a crafty afternoon game.

At least now I feel less bad for not turning up. I got home and before I knew it it was ten o'clock.

I couldn't tell you what the first game I ever played was, but my first computer was an Amstrad CPC-464, and the main game I remember playing on that was Lost Caves: It imagine it's from a genre of games, but I wasn't very versed in those things at the time, so the only other thing I knew like it was Repton for the BBC Micro: You went around "eating" some stuff which I thought of as "sand", and avoiding boulders and enemy men. You could drop boulders on their heads. I found the mechanics quite confusing, as you could move in all directions, as though the perspective was from above, but the boulders fell downwards, as though it was from the side. I guess it was just a system that worked, but it bothered me. It (along with Tetris) was one of the few games my dad got really into (other than arcade machines before I was born), and he took to leaving the computer on in my room overnight so that he wouldn't lose his progress when he got stuck on a particularly hard level. Eventually we gave up, though. It's weird, looking at screenshots and casting my mind back evokes a very particular if not especially clear feeling. I couldn't tell you what it is -- it's not really an emotion or a thought -- just that it's strongly associated with being at that age and playing that game. Very strange. It might not even have been that similar to Repton. I'm not sure if I ever even played the latter, as it was my cousin who had the BBC Micros. On my Amstrad I also had a game called Bomb Jack, Fast Food Dizzy (which was a Pac-Man clone with Dizzy characters), and two Postman Pat games. I liked the first Postman Pat game more than the second, because Postman Pat 2 was some sort of RPG-type thing with a lot of dialogue (boooooooooring), whereas the first game was a fun top-down thing where you had to shoot letters out of your van windows directly into people's postboxes. There was also a minigame where you had to help a farmer round his sheep (without leaving your van). Unfortunately it was possible to accidentally get your van stuck sideways in a thin bridge, at which point you would be unable to proceed. I think that's probably how every single one of my tries at that game ended. I also had Contra (although it may have been called Gryzor because I'm in Europe, apparently), which was way too hard for me. It wasn't until a year or two ago that I realized that game wasn't entirely obscure, and this Contra thing everyone was talking about was something I'd actually played. Sorry, I'm going on way too much. It's just interesting to remember my pre-PC pre-console days. After that it was all Prince of Persia, Lemmings and Keen on the former, and Sonic on the latter.

I have a Logitech MX518. I like it very much, but it's the first non-shit mouse I've ever owned, so I couldn't compare it with any of the other doubtlessly very fine mice mentioned in this thread.

I know, I know, I just couldn't resist the rhyme thing. But I also couldn't give up battlethumbs, because battlethumbs are the best. Otherwise it could have been "Idlefield: Bad Thumbpany". But battlethumbs. Battlethumbs.

Not that I want to push you down the wrong road or anything Andy, but it's probably better to have doubts about doing something than to do nothing because of your doubts, which is pretty much what I do. Clearly the medical profession can confront you with some pretty rough stuff, so the uncertainties we all feel from time to time can, I imagine, be hugely compounded. That's not to say that your concerns are unfounded; just take some time to consider whether the source of your anxiety is a mood, or a more fundamental dissatisfaction. I'd recommend considering the positive influence you can have if it weren't such an obvious suggestion. Anyway, best of luck, whichever path you take. (I say that as though you're going away somewhere. Weird.) ANDY IS A COOL GUY I DON'T KNOW HOW TO END THIS POST

Yeah, you can do, although it sounds a bit like it's a "main guy plus guest" affair. I think you get the same units, but split them over two people for massive damage. Or finer micromanaging or something. I wouldn't mind giving that a go, if we can work out some sort of schedule (as in not just playing one mission then forgetting all about it... Not that that would be particularly horrendous, but it'd be a shame).

Friday is generally my doing-stuff-with-real-people evening, so I'm pretty consistently busy then. Saturday is a day when I'm only sometimes doing stuff with real people in the evening, so that would be better for me. I can also do late games then, as I don't have work in the morning. I'm hardly ever doing stuff with real people on weekdays, so other than Tuesday they would work well for me, other than Tuesday. Or alternate Sundays would be fine by me. I don't really mind. Also, Battlethumbs: Idle Thumbpany. Too far?

I'm up for some Last Stand or whatever it's called. Like Patters said, it's pretty fun. Also, I've only played once, so you don't have to worry about me calling you a n00b.

I think a whole load of people are playing it as straight deathmatch, because on more than one occasion I've felt like I was performing distinctly averagely, only to find myself at the top of the scoreboard (for both teams, even). I'm sure this will happen less as people either learn to play more to the objectives (team or class), or simply drop off in favour of more deathmatch-oriented FPSes, but it's an indicator that paying attention to all that stuff is worthwhile. You don't even have to be particularly smart about it, and it makes the game a lot more fun. I keep giving the engineer a go, only to find no tanks of either affiliation anywhere in sight, at which point I switch back to medic (which I quite enjoy), when of course a whole platoon of the fuckers rolls over the horizon. VIDEO GAMES.

Whatever, I just really like saying battlethumbs.

I went with 'Thumb'. We are an army of battlethumbs.

I was once again struggling to contain my laughter at work. Just like old times. As in last year.

Or they could all be number 50, and we can wear our party hats for each of them. There need never be a Grand Thumbs Auto 51.

Battlethumbs: Idle Company