James

I'd quite like to play it co-op sometime so that we actually complete all the rounds. That needn't be a Thumbs game, of course, particularly considering the usually high turnout.

I fully support the return of Sands of time-esque gameplay-as-story nonsense. I note Steve was on that episode, too. Is this the Gaynor Effect? Then I fell into a pit of spikes.

There wasn't meant to be any value judgement in there. I quite like Modeselektor. A lot of my favourite bands are fairly obscure ... or are they?

I don't know, I kind of like the slightly different and perhaps ambiguous air that a well-produced radio programme can have.

I've heard that a few times before. I guess Modeselektor is yet another music act less obscure than I thought.

In my limited experience, people have been pretty positive about it. There was a lot of skepticism when the change was first announced, but I think once people see it in action they're generally sold. I'm basing that on podcasts and a couple of friends. That's what I mean by "limited".

At least two of us have mentioned Portal, thankyouverymuch. Having said that, and good though the ending credits are, I kind of think of them separately from the rest of the game. Perhaps I'm taking it too seriously, but the silly bits (the song and all the cake stuff) completely irrelevant to what I like about Portal. It's a superbly-told story that I can take seriously, and it capable of being funny without relying on the crutch of a zany gimmick (ask someone to come up with something "random" and they will, in my experience, almost always pick either an animal or a foodstuff) or a novelty song. Not that either is bad *– it's just that it doesn't really fit with my conception of the world. But the whole world disagrees with me, apparently, so I must be wrong.

Metastatus: status is up-to-date.

I'd certainly be interested in some PC Borderlands action.

I'll get right on it as soon as I finish Research and Development. Incidentally, during GTA I thought you just had a peculiar way of pronouncing "manoeuvre", so I ended up finding it by searching for "Metastasis".

I thought that was Dragon Age.

MAGNETO LEGO SUMS Good to hear you got into a game eventually, Groucho.

I was thinking the exact same thing.

You assumed that Wrestle had a problem with the mere formation of words, independent of any associated concept? Or that the application of such a concept to such a context is wrong, independent of the wrongness of said concept? I took it to pretty clearly mean that the idea of Donkey Kong in a thong is itself wrong, so unless you're referring to the reality of Donkey Kong's attire (which, I put it to you, is a category error: Donkey Kong does not exist, so claims about his actual attire are not true), so your question is redundant. DISCLAIMER: I don't know what I'm talking about. I pretty much bluffed my way through it. I would read the question and say what I thought with barely any reference to any existing material. Apparently that is worth a degree.

Weirdly, though, voice chat rarely seems to degrade much* when I'm playing with you guys. I wonder if it's given a high bandwidth priority or something. * In the technical sense. Impressive levels of social degradation may or may not be achieved.

I imagine audio data, however compressed, is a lot more bandwidth-hungry than input signals.

TAUTOLOGY ALERT

Yeah, I didn't quite pick up what was going on, but I couldn't hear your explanation over all the other stuff going on. Were you having connection issues? Anyway, it was a fun round with some great moments, and it's good to see some new people. Hopefully you'll actually be able to play next time, Groucho, rather than merely eavesdropping on our splendidly erudite banter. Yes, your heroic and manly scream would have nicely punctuated proceedings, Twatblix.

I think he's objecting to how much it differs from the word combination it's supposedly contracting: "will not" does not contain the letters or phonemes of "won't" in order. But the word clearly has an etymology that makes sense when set against the context of the language at the time, so yes, it is fairly arbitrary.

I should be back this week.

I've been pretty set on getting Borderlands for the PC, but a friend of mine suggested that we play it on 360, so I'm torn. I've heard the PC version is noticeably better, and I'd previously decided without justification that that was the system it should be on, but I feel a bit bad for abandoning him. But I'm forever getting things on inferior platforms because of my stupid friends. That's an exaggerration.

The latest Prince of Persia game didn't manage to achieve either for me. OOH, TANGENTIAL AND UNNECESSARY BURN.

Videogams?

Gargoyles* on the insides of buildings, perhaps? Some people have been commenting on that. * They might possibly be more accurately described as chimera or grotesques.

No you willn't.