James

Also, that ukulele-keyboard thing is cool.

If nothing goes wrong, I'll be there. As Mr. V alluded to, there is fire, but not much in the way of trucks. Not to worry; here is an in-depth guide to mastering the former.

Yeah, I always feel like I should be co-ordinating more with my team, but when it comes to it I can't really think of much in the way of tactics other than "pick on the guy at the back" or "wait until we've all spawned so we can all attack at once", and I usually don't even bother vocalizing those. Playing team-based multiplayer games on PC and PS3 brings home what a difference packing a microphone as standard makes. Even if the majority of players do have a microphone, there isn't the assumption that there will be voice chat, so I think people are more reluctant to be chatty. There's a kind of critical mass problem -- for me at least -- where if there isn't enough general chatter going on I feel a bit awkward about speaking myself. Which doesn't necessarily stop me (sorry for my incessant inanities, everyone), but it does make things a bit less natural. When I'm playing with the other Dan (as in my friend who joined us last week) we natter away pretty much constantly, and that makes me feel more at-ease, which is nice, even if we're not actually arranging any particularly deep strategies. I guess it might be annoying for others, though. I don't mean to criticize less vocal players -- I always have a great time with you guys -- it's just something that strikes me when we play. Definitely. I had two goes, each resulting in annihilation. I was a bit confused and lost at first on the finale, but I managed to leave most of the opposing team dangling off disparate ledges, which is always the danger on that rooftop. Was it me, or was there an unusually high number of tanks last night?

A lot of these covers are ringing bells. Where the Wild Things Are in particular, although if you'd just mentioned the title I wouldn't have known what you were talking about. Just how challenging were the choices?

Oh, I didn't spot that you mentioned the Solaris soundtrack, Nachimir. I downloaded that on a friend's recommendation, and I really like it. It doesn't completely transcend its original intent -- it is at times apparent that it's meant to be an accompaniment and doesn't quite work as an album in its own right -- but I think there are some great ideas in there. Well, specifically, one great idea: using steel drums as a moody textural ... thing. (I'm not good at talking about things critically.)

Everyone pretend I made a horrible joke regarding the ambiguous scope of the word "favourite" in the thread title. That way I won't have to actually write it and can hate myself slightly less. I don't really remember much of what I read and had read to me as a child. The earliest books I can remember being really into were Discworld ones and Hitch-Hiker's Guide, both of which would have been in my early teens or slightly before. When I was much younger than that I had The Hobbit read to me, which I suppose is more for children than Lord of the Rings. Anyway, it's not that I didn't read any proper children's books, or that they weren't any good; it's just that I have an appalling memory and a boring personality. I guess I remember reading and listening to the tape version of The Hodgeheg by Dick King-Smith quite a lot. I also listened to an audiobook version of Wind in the Willows, which had some classical music (all Beethoven, I think) between all the chapters and possibly at other intervals, too. That left a lasting impression on me, and I still associate some passages of the music with lying in my bunk bed waiting to get to sleep. In retrospect, it was a great way to expose a child to "serious" music. I also had three little books that followed different processes with a bunch of wide pictures with plentiful cut-away sections. The processes they followed were the postal system, and the manufacturing of Lego and bread. It gave the impression that the whole thing was a left-to-right progression and that a large portion of transportation happened in long metal tubes. In retrospect, they might not have been especially accurate. I really liked them, though. I liked to see how things (apparently) worked, and I think I was interested by the slightly artificial and unreal presentation. The appeal was something like that of model railways and so on, I imagine. I don't think I actually read much, though. I was and am woefully lazy.

I'm shitting out IGN reviews left, right and centre. 7.9/10

Believe it or not, that was entirely accidental.

On the other hand, speaking as someone who enjoys playing the drums in rhythm games but who is pretty much downright awful at them, this might be right up my alley.

Michael Bay?

Then add another tear to the torrent of sorrow I'm weeping for my species. Or something.

That's hot. According to the font of all knowledge, modern toilet paper was introduced in 1857. Perhaps they were just being very imprecise with their dates. Or it could have been when they started perforating it or making it with two layers or something. Personally, I long for the days when paper was way too expensive to use for that and people wiped their arses with sponges or leaves or snakes.

Boom! I'm thinking I'll get this when the price comes down a bit. I've been interested in it since I first started hearing about it, but I've heard it's a bit wonky in some respects, and I've got plenty of other stuff to be playing right now. Also, it probably wouldn't hurt to put some distance between it and inFamous, even if they aren't as similar as they at first appear. I am definitely interested, though.

Fog is so gay. At university I briefly found it amusing to replace the word "days" with the word "gays" in songs. I think the only two I did before losing interest were "Happy Gays" and "Thank You for the Gays". After that I decided it probably wasn't entirely OK to keep going on about gays and that maybe I was being a bit awful. Also it probably wasn't actually very funny.

Indeed. It does make me wonder, though, whether the questions were presented in the multiple choice manner presented in the article or if people were just given a picture of a human and asked to mark the spot; if it's the latter, I could understand people placing the heart on the left side of the chest, as that's where it appears to be judging by heartbeat. Still, disheartening.

Your ambivalence is fine, I just think it's more to do with your feelings on the games' content than their prevalence.

I finished Nation by Terry Pratchett a couple of weeks back (it was good, although I found the "does not happen" stuff a bit cheesy and ridiculous), and have moved on to Gödel, Escher, Bach. After several train journeys to and from work, I have made my way through the 20th anniversary edition introduction and yesterday made a start on the book itself. I'm not a fast reader, and it's a large book. This could take quite some time.

"So awesome I puked all over my keyboard. My fingers are knuckle-deep in vom." - IGN.com

Apparently he was a nightmare to work with, which is hard to reconcile with how happy he looks all the time, but I guess that's the way things go with these creative types. At least he looked like he had a good time when he was playing. I thought he was one ex-third. I have a couple of their albums, and they are, indeed, excellent. The rest is all new to me, however, and I'll be sure to check it out. Sometime after getting out of bed. Including the days that follow it. So at some point in the infinite future. Anyway, thanks.

Really? I find his voice amusing an pleasant. Perhaps it's a novelty to me.

From what I've heard, they're similar in premise but not execution. And I can't be blamed for my indifference to sports games, but I don't see any problem with the frequency with which they're released. Besides, two years is a pretty long time in gaming. I can understand comments about the proximity of Prototype to inFamous (of which there have been plenty), but Crackdown seems completely irrelevant to this whole thing. But this isn't even like that. It's not like we're being besieged by one open-world superhero game after another; we're just happening to get two apparently similar ones at once. It's more like when 3:10 to Yuma and The Assassination of Jesse James came out within a couple of weeks of one another. They were apparently similar to one another, but hardly a genre we were drowning in, and the films themselves were actually sufficiently different to be individually interesting. They were also both good, but I don't yet know whether the analogy stretches that far, not having played Prototype. I obviously won't deny the similarities in premise, to the degree that it's probably slightly embarrassing for the parties involved, but I see it much more as an unfortunate coincidence than evidence of the industry's shameful lack of imagination (which isn't to say that that isn't a problem).

Hahahaha. Perhaps I should apply for a job there. That's a great analogy. I started to write something about the fate of PC gaming, but it was a bit depressing and I decided that I didn't really know what I was talking about anyway. In summary it was basically "I'm not sure if enough people can be bothered with it any more" (which goes for everyone: players, developers, publishers). Hopefully I'm wrong, but it seems easy to get dissuaded when there are (apparently) much simpler options out there. But hopefully I'm wrong.

I'd say PC. I initially got it for 360 because my PC at the time was crappy, and it was fun, but I'm playing it so much more on the PC. That's partly because I hardly know anyone with it on 360, but also because it seems much more at home on PC. And it looks better. And there's the potential for user content and so on, although I haven't actually tried any of that yet. And some of the servers have crazy stat-tracking tools. Also, you totally want in on Left 4 Thumbs, and it's quite hurtful that you would even consider otherwise. Incidentally, don't worry too much about your microphone. It seems like voice chat is much less the norm in our PC games. I mean, it would be better if you could get it working, but you wouldn't be the only silent player if you didn't.

Oh Internet, you sociopathic scamp.

Awesome and awesome. I'll look out for more Buddy Rich stuff. The main thing I like about Jo Jones is that he always looks so calm and like he's just kind of mucking about, even when he's doing stuff that's absolutely crazy to me. GrKShqNkcnI