James

Doesn't HDMI have recording protection stuff that requires that you have expensive equipment to capture it? And isn't the 360 quite strict about all that HDCP stuff? If I unplug my HDMI cable from my monitor to check something on one of the other devices I use it for (I don't have a switch or multiple HDMI ports), when I reconnect it the 360 restarts. I'd prefer to record things properly rather than pointing cameras at screens, but I don't really want to play in SD. Then again, I suppose I could live with it. But if, as you suggest, syphoning off signal from an HD feed – even if the syphoned signal was SD – is a possibility, I'd be interested in how it's done. I mean, clearly it's possible to split a signal and so on, but I mean if it's possible for a moderately interested home user.

I played so much of the Action Supercross demo. It was so similar that I looked it up and some website seemed to imply that they were actually made by the same people or something, but I don't know, and I can't be bothered to cause myself to know. I think Action Supercross used to be called something else or subsequently became called something else. I don't know. That game was crazy, and it makes me consider buying Trials HD, but it might kill me. Fucking computeogames. I played more Warcraft 1 than any of the latter Warcraft games. My three main memories are seeing the then-fancy intro movie, seeing the then-fancy intro movie WITH SPEECH BECAUSE IT WAS THE CD VERSION HOLY SHIT, and playing hours and hours of multiplayer with my cousin over a null modem cable and later a parallel printer cable. We also played Doom (including deathmatch-in-co-op-while-looking-through-the-other-guy's-eyes: a second person shooter) and Linewars. Why Linewars? I don't know. In that game when you went up you went slightly diagonally. Again, I don't know why.

I love how quietly demented it all seems without music or voice chat. This guy is just going about his business, as rockets fire in the background and cars drive into him. Then he rockets through the air without even the smallest of yelps. I like ruining things for people who are actually trying. And anyone else, to be honest. That in particular was great fun, though. I figured putting a roadblock immediately after a corner would limit people's ability to power through.

That's how a friend and I did this.

One time the deputy head of my school called me to his office to ask if I was getting into seances and the occult because I wrote a stupid unfunny stream-of-consciousness joke answer to a question that wanted me to write a pretend letter to an airport or something in Business Studies. I was kind of pleased with that at the time.

The whole point is that I don't want to get a controller just for my PC, as hardly any PC games warrant it. Reusing my console controllers seems like a very neat solution to the problem. If I were to buy a new controller, I'd probably get a wired 360 one. It seems daft, though, considering I already have two wireless ones, and I hardly ever play local multiplayer any more. My frustration is that if I want to use a 360 controller I have to either buy a wired one or buy a receiver for my wireless ones, which is doubly frustrating when you consider the fact that I had to pay extra for the Play and Charge kit, which the controller is constantly plugged in to anyway because I once left it plugged in too long and that messed the battery up. The PS3 controller, on the other hand, uses a standard USB cable, and actually transfers input data down it, so all it took was a couple of very small free downloads and some admittedly frustrating fiddling around to get them working as generic PC gamepads. If someone could work out a way to disguise them as 360 controllers and make them compatible with all the Games for Windows stuff, I'd be set. As it stands, I can't really justify buying any extra stuff just to use controllers on the one or two PC games that kind of feel like they could do with it. On the other hand, the PC ports of console games are often considerably cheaper, so it might save me money in the long run. And I'm not exactly sensible about these things, anyway. Maybe... I kind of feel like I don't want to reward Microsoft for being so dumb about it, though. I really appreciate it when manufacturers use standard interfaces and so on. On the other hand, the PS3 controller battery is non-replaceable, which might one day be a problem. But at least it doesn't disintegrate if I leave it plugged in overnight. Mouselook was welcome (as always), but, as with many third-person games, I found that movement of the character when I was looking around corners in anticipation felt really clumsy and ugly. It wouldn't really matter for gameplay, but just having 8 directions bothered me. I had the same problem with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. What really annoyed me about that was that I thought the mouse worked much better than a controller for other stuff in that game. In Batman, on the other hand, it feels like all the aiming is loose enough not to be a problem.

I'm probably going to get this. I'm thinking of going for the PC version, as it's about £15 cheaper, although I think it might be suited to controllers, so that sent me back into the internal debate of whether to get a wired 360 controller. a receiver dongle for the wireless controllers I already have, or say "fuck you Microsoft and your stupid peripherals". The Games for Windows thing was meant to make using a 360 controller a simple plug-and-play affair, so why do I need extra hardware to use the controller that comes with the good versions of their console? (Possibly all versions now – does the low-end variant still come with a wired controller?) I get that the Play and Charge kit hardly transfers any data, but it seems dumb that they set it up that way. Did they not plan for this Games for Windows thing when they were designing the controller? WOAH, sorry, a bit of a tangential rant there. Mouse and keyboard seemed OK, but I'd still probably rather go with controller. Perhaps I'll get a wired one. It doesn't support generic ones, does it? I got my PS3 controllers working OK on the PC. As for the game itself: I liked the demo. My main complaint was that people show up as skeletons in detective mode. I imagine I'd stay in detective mode most of the time to stay aware of nearby enemies and so on, but the take-down stuff looks kind of dumb on skeletons.

I fully get not wanting to buy the game because you don't want to give money or respect to Card, but the actual content of the story is so throwaway and irrelevant that it really shouldn't be putting people off, I think. I doubt any of us seriously fears indoctrination from a 2D action/exploration game. There are guys in uniform who want to take over America. They have absurd technology and funds. That's about as far as it goes. If they didn't have "Progressive" in their name, I don't think there would be any evidence of their ideology in the game whatsoever. Then again, I wasn't really listening at all. If I understand correctly, doing that is actually necessary for doing the 4% run, which is one of the achievements (although it may be an in-game one rather than an Xbox Live one). EDIT: Jesus Christ, this is poorly written. Half the words are repeated on the same bloody line! It's horrible! (Disclaimer: I'm only a few sentences in.)

Funnily enough, I was paying little enough attention to the story that I'd assumed the bad guys were right-wingers. I was listening to podcasts and watching videos throughout, and I don't feel like it lessened the experience in the slightest. The only thing which slightly troubles me is the idea of a portion of my money going to Card, but as has been said, he's only credited as a very special thanks, so I'm not sure how much he's profiting off this in particular, and I'm not really much of a boycotter anyway. The thing that bothers me about giving him money is not his personal wealth, but the prospect of his using that to fund a cause I disagree with, and there isn't really any way of knowing that others aren't doing that in private. Perhaps I'm just avoiding the issue so that I can justify playing a game I want to play, but it seems to me that the whole six degrees of separation thing dictates that we can never regulate where our money ends up. What is an acceptable distance from what we consider a bad cause? Does this difficulty mean we should give up on being idealogical with our purchases altogether? I suppose not. Anyway, I don't feel too tormented about it. Hahahaha, yeah. At first I was focusing on headshots because I like to shoot people in the head, but then I noticed someone was ahead of me in mêlée, so I focussed on that for a bit, and then I continued to focus on it, and then I realized it was quite easy and amusing to just run straight into a bunch of guys and beat them all up, and then I got the fancy armour that enables crazy ragdoll physics and now I'm a little bit annoyed when he does the previously cool take-downs because they don't launch people across the room. I'm not doing particularly well on the screams, though. I took a whopping eleven hours to finish the game, but that's partly because I went for (and got) 100%, and partly because I obsessed over getting some of the items before I got power-ups that would have made it a hell of a lot easier (some of them are pretty fiddly regardless, though, to the point that I was thinking that there must be a neater way of doing it). I didn't do the tutorial stuff, so I didn't know that there was going to be a triple-jump. That would have helped quite a lot with a few of them. Anyway, it's a really great game, so it's a shame that one tangentially-involved dick is preventing some from playing it. People are perfectly entitled to boycott, and I'm not questioning anyone's decision to do so, but it sucks that it had to be this game that got caught up in it.

I never had an Amiga myself, but I know that some old systems had borders around all edges, which I think was down to technical stuff like refresh rates or memory or something. Perhaps it's something like that. Or perhaps I shouldn't respond to questions I don't know the answer to.

I should probably be hesitant about posting other people's voices all over the Internet willy-nilly, but apparently I'm not. Well I am, but it's only a very brief hesitation. For what it's worth, I tried to set things up so that none of the voice is recorded, but Left 4 Dead doesn't seem to pay any attention to what voice-out device I've selected. It may be to do with the recording software. I'll look into it when I remember to. Anyway, we had to go back for Dan, as he was probably doing a lot of the work in the first place. In fact, it would be pretty mean to leave anyone behind, what with the amount of time we all put into it. NO MAN LEFT BEHIND.

No, yeah, I tried the querystring thing with my embedded L4D videos. I couldn't get them to work.

So Danny Boy and I gathered a couple of you forumites (ysbreker and DanJW*) and beat another Expert campaign on Saturday, and I finally got around to uploading the video of the finale: sXeoXqS7pK4 It's slightly less of a cheat than what we did for No Mercy, but still a bit cheap. Still, we got there through entirely legitimate means, and it took us a few goes, so I think we achieved something. * Sorry is 5Shilling is not DanJW. I get confused with all these names.

That was me actually. I'd completely forgotten about it. I have no idea why it happened, but it was awesome. Again, I wish I'd recorded it.

Yeah, I don't do that.

NOTHING AT ALL. You have 6 or 7 hours of free time a day plus time for the other stuff you mentioned? I envy you. Actually, if I did have that time (like I do this week, as I'm on holiday) I'd only fritter it (like I am this week, as I'm on holiday). Part of my problem is that I'm far too hesitant to spend my time on something that might not work out, so I don't spend my time on anything meaningful, meaning that nothing works out because I never even start anything. But at least I haven't failed at anything in particular! I also don't really have any particular talent for anything. If I had to list my skills, computer programming and scripting would be somewhere near the top, but the stuff I do is so hilariously basic that it really doesn't even bear mentioning. It's a bit strange, because I don't think of myself as stupid or utterly incompetent (I might be fairly incompetent), but when it comes to assessing my knowledge of or skill at a particular thing I always seem to be hopelessly outclassed by everyone with a genuine interest with it. I guess I do have quite a defeatist streak to me. Basically, I have to be sure I'll succeed at something before trying it, and nothing is ever certain, so I never try anything. That's an exaggeration, of course, but it pretty much sums things up. So yeah, about the closest I get is occasionally mucking around with programming stuff (which I mainly did while I was unemployed). I was also half of a project that made horrible sounds that one might call music if that weren't a mockery to music itself. It was mainly done by mucking around with computers and pre-existing material, didn't involve any talent, compositionally or in "performance" (most of which I couldn't recreate live, or recreate at all), was a lot of the time deliberately abrasive and unpleasant, and was borne out of something far more destructive than creative. The original idea was basically a joke that we kind of followed through on very slowly for a couple of years. Some of it was funny to us, and I do kind of like some of what I made, but it's not indicative of anything greater. It's like when I muck around with the filters in Photoshop. I can piss around until I stumble on some pleasing distortion, but it's not part of any coherent idea or direction. Also, it's not appealing to anyone with any taste at all. Anyway, the whole idea was basically pointless and stupid contrariness. I probably sound a lot more depressed than I actually am, by the way. It's a bit disappointing and frustrating not to have more skills (or focus), but I don't really mind too much. And it may just be laziness that's holding me back, so what right do I have to be depressed about something that's my own doing?

I'm simultaneously pleased with myself for (accidentally) doing two awesome stunts, and annoyed with myself for failing to record it. Anyway, I felt that driving with you was a bonding experience. Now we are as brothers. Fuck that Grippage loser in Australia or wherever. If it's any consolation, the force of the explosion blasted me against a wall (I'd guessed what was going on just as the car was approaching, and had just disembarked). A very good game all round. It was weird being one of the people actually trying to finish in the firetruck race. Also, I would like to note my forcing n0wak and myself off the side of the elevated road in our ice cream trucks. It was a small and relatively private moment, but for me it consisted entirely of glee.

a) Totally To the max

Voice chat has always been a bit quiet for me, on all systems, meaning I always have to turn the main game volume down a bit. Not loads, and I can generally hear people OK, but still. I, too, suspect that my hearing may be sub-optimal. Stupid music.

There's something weirdly captivating about that picture.

I don't think that's a "but" necessarily. I listed several anime productions I like, which to me doesn't invalidate my other frustrations with incredibly widespread genre tropes. I guess it's a matter of whether the exceptions are revealing previously unappreciated facets of the genre/style/medium/whatever, or simply transcending the stuff that bothers you by being very high-quality in other areas. For example, the musicals that I've liked haven't revealed to me that I've been wrong all this time; they've just been interesting or entertaining enough to let me look past my intolerance to the things I don't like about musicals.

We could play co-op sometime if you're ever not snoozing on Steam. Then I could get the co-op achievements OH YES.

Yep.

Is that what he looks like? To my shame, I haven't played that game past the end of the demo yet. It's on my list of SYNONYM FOR SHAME. My current game is Dawn of War 2 on the PC. Is this all a nasty fraud?

The race to 6000!