James

These first-person shooters man... Call of Duty 4 is only two years old. Sorry, I'm being an arse. And I do appreciate that there are many who genuinely do get fed up with all the FPSes (I don't, really). I guess I just think there's a lot you can do in a genre, so as long as the games have some sort of originality to them it's no real surprise or problem that lots of them share some mechanics and other properties.

All I've played so far is the tutorial, and I did fine at that; I'm just concerned about the volume of extra stuff that I can see but am not actually paying attention to.

I'm not saying AC was free from game-ness (the hiding places were all completely contrived, as you say), but I found it a lot less jarring than PoP. It may just be me, but I found PoP's design much less compelling than AC. I'd rather play more AC than more PoP. I'm not sure I can quite put my finger on what it was about Prince that made it fall so flat for me. I suspect it was a combination of factors. A lot of people seemed concerned with its easiness, but I don't think that's really a problem for me, although the degree to which the checkpoint system was forgiven may be related; it encouraged me to treat the whole thing as a trial-and-error process rather than feel any concern for my character or sense of investment in his fate. This is obviously my own doing, but often, rather than properly observing my environment (because it was all abstract nonsense to me), I'd just try each of the compass points until one of them didn't lead me to my doom. That's kind of like the "combine everything" thing one resorts to when frustrated in adventure games, and is similarly devoid of fun. I prefer it when I get at least some kind of idea as to what I ought to be doing by observing my surroundings, which I didn't feel like I was being encouraged to do at all. I actually have quite a high tolerance for lack of realism. I wasn't particularly put off by the weird traps in Warrior Within, as far as I can remember. Perhaps it's because I'd been trained to expect that kind of ridiculousness. I don't know. But the new game crossed some sort of line. I don't know, I feel like a lot of this comes down to idiosyncracies on my part, but I think they only heighten stuff that is up with the game in the first place. I guess I'd sum my feelings up by saying that at the end of Assassin's Creed what I wanted is for them to do a sequel that refined and fixed all the stuff that's wrong with it, which is a lot of stuff, but I was really fond of the basics of the game, whereas when I finished Prince of Persia I was left wondering how long they'd be putting out games based on this model before they move on to something else that I'm more likely to appreciate. The game seemed to be fundamentally at odds with what I wanted from it. Perhaps that's too strong -- it is, after all, all about the same sort of traversal that's at the centre of all the PoP games that I had such a good time with -- but it felt wrong. In Assassin's Creed, the way Altaïr moves is probably the best thing about the game. Sorry, I'm rambling. I could go on about how I think the claw messes up the mechanics further and so on, but it really wouldn't be interesting.

Hey, cool. I got Civ Rev a while back and it did a great job of easing me into the whole Civilization thing (something I'd always been interested in, but a little intimidated by). I still anticipate having some struggle in wrapping my head around the PC counterparts, but I was enthused enough buy Civ 4 a little while back and will at some point sit down and apply my strategy-impaired brain to it.

Overinflated senses of entitlement? On the Internet?! YOU SAID YOU'D GET ME A DRINK AND YOU LIED!

Definitely. It had its problems, and some pretty transparent repetition, but at least the whole world didn't seem dead and uninhabitable. They might not have bothered with the façade of varied missions, but at least they bothered with the façade of a world that makes some kind of sense, rather than a series of abstract obstacle courses. I don't know, I finished Prince of Persia, so I can't have hated it, but it really bothered me in some quite serious ways. It was a weird and cold and empty experience for me.

Well enough, apparently.

If rescheduling GTA is out of the question (or even if it's not), I'll happily play either of those. I'm pretty much always up for L4D, and I ought to get some more TF2 done at some point. I guess the concern with the latter would be the number of players: would we gather enough to make a reasonable-sized game, or would we have to mingle with grotty outsiders? We could always use a Steam window for voice chat so that we don't actually have to communicate with the scum. Or just run a small game, I guess. I have no idea how well it scales. And I suppose the concern with the former would for a lesser man be that it's only two days after our Sunday session. Good thing, then, that we are all mighty titans of gaming, able to turn our godlike attention to whatever we see fit, endlessly slaughtering zombies without a trace of fatigue. Oh, I don't really mind my hang-ups. I pretty much get my mayhem fix from the multiplayer.

My point was that using "p" to distinguish from "i" was unnecessary, although I guess 720i doesn't exist. Ack, of course. But it doesn't actually matter, other than proving that I am a fool. Crap. My point was that 720p is a video mode, but really I was just being an arse and it's fine to use it as shorthand for a resolution and I got what I deserved.

In school one of my classmates and at that point a member of my circle of friends read Mein Kampf. I'm not sure how far he got, and he didn't seem to be particularly into race war (at the time the person he was closest to at school was of Sri Lankan descent), although I guess he was probably the most right-wing of us. And yes, that thing Nevsky posted seems a much better response to the BNP than eggs. I share the disapproval of the party, but physical assaults don't exactly lend legitimacy to those who oppose the BNP, and leaves the door open to cries of victimization and all sorts of nasty talk about how thuggish the pinko leftists all are. They're already claiming the government instructed the police to hold back.

Yeah, I am. They're pretty good. I was really into GY!BE and associated projects for a while, and I saw Mono fairly recently, who were very good. I haven't been listening to a great deal of music on the whole recently. I'm still stuck on my horrendously old MP3 player, which is so large I don't really like to carry it in a trouser pocket, so during the summer it doesn't get much use. I'd upgrade, but no players seem to offer the feature set I want (not least because everyone seems to be moving towards proprietary software rather than taking the "treat it as a USB drive" route). Anyway, the most recent things I got into were Stars of the Lid and Dälek, so I'm often tempted to fall back on them, but I try to go through everything and re-discover things that are good. I really like a lot of what I've heard of christ.'s music and must one day get some more stuff like that (suggestions are welcome). And at work sometimes I listen to a load of YouTube videos of jazz drumming. So far I've learnt that Papa Jo Jones and Max Roach seem pretty good. Beyond that I'm woefully ignorant. I really ought to learn some stuff about some music.

THE SHAME THE REGRET I haven't really played much single player apart from TLAD since well before starting the multiplayer, but during TLAD I still tried to be fairly reasonable to bystanders. I think since the multiplayer has none of the story stuff I feel more OK about being indiscriminately psychotic. If I do go on a rampage in single player, I generally won't save it, even though there aren't really any consequences in the long run. I've just got an irrational part of my mind that separates that out into a parallel universe where the little man is not my little man who I want to be an at least half-way sympathetic character even though he inevitably won't be by the end of the story. I think Toblix mentioned on his Twitter thingy that XBL will be down for some of Tuesday. Have we worked out whether that will interfere with our next session? It'd be pretty shitty to miss two weeks in a row. No wait, I didn't mean that.

a) I'm in Surrey, so not especially near Nottingham When I say "a bunch", it's probably more like two or three. But I don't generally throw that sort of stuff away. Do you have any use for a broken PSU that I opened up out of the sort of curiosity that doesn't lead to any actual knowledge (it's not like I learnt anything by looking at the mess of wires and stuff in there)? If a couple of hard disks would be worth your time, though, I'll see if I can find them in the horrible mess I keep things in. I make no promises about promptness, however.

That tethering thing was an (admittedly appaling) joke, by the way. Reading it back I realized that in its absence of humour it gave the impression that I was an obscenely optimistic idiot (rather than just an idiot). Sometimes I confound even myself with my inanity.

Incidentally, I posted all that using my phone. Fuck txt tlk.

Grippage, you are a hero. Unfortunately, my home phone and Internet are down, so unless BT are swift to repair it or I work out a way to tether my mobile phone to my 360 (I beleive my network forbids tethering) and get acceptable speeds, I won't be able to make it tonight. This saddens me. I was, as ever, looking forward to it. The last time I lost Internet service in any significant fashion it was down for over a month and ended up with us ditching that shitty provider. When it went down I was pretty OK at Call of Duty 4 multiplayer; when it came back everyone was about a billion times better than me. I don't know whether I lost my touch or everyone else practiced a bunch or both. And that's pretty much what stopped me playing that game.

It's game!

I have a bunch of broken hard disks. Some of them might not even have anything incriminating on them! They're pretty broken, though. Or you could just set up a partition. Or perhaps you don't have enough space to be throwing around willy-nilly. Willy.

Thirty already! And I've been there for some of them! Wait, when did this overtake the number of podcast episodes? Or did it start before all that? I demand answers! Actually, I guess it just catches up this week, and that's because of E3. Still. It's a thing.

I assumed you guys were both caught up in zombie havock, but afterwards ysbreaker did mention that you were just standing there as we died. I like to imagine his desperation and incomprehension of your apparent cold indifference to our fate. I'll hold off on the whole Windows 7 thing for a while, then. Perhaps it would be a good idea to set up a dual-boot arrangement.

"Literally the best game I've ever played. 8.3/10" - IGN.com

They're probably my favourite band. That's some sort of overlap right there.

Is it possible for a static image to be interlaced? HAR HAR I'M SUCH A BLOODY SMARTARSE. Sorry.

Yeah, it's all pretty depressing. Speaking of fronts of a national nature, one time I was having a meal at a fairly family-friendly pub-restaurant, and I had to use the toilet. Painted over, but still clearly visible on the inside of the stall door, was some etched graffiti, including a swastika accompanied by "NF" (National Front). What amused me was that the swastika was wrong. It's probably not too uncommon to have all the points facing the wrong way (as I'm sure someone will point out is a cultural and religious symbol still used in the East without any relation to the Nazis), but this one had half of the points facing the wrong way. That's so self-evidently wrong it beggars belief. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised that at least some of the people who espouse such views aren't of spectacular intellect. I guess that's a pretty dull story, but it was a weird and faintly amusing experience.

I liked it when I was on the winning team. Nah, it was good fun. I liked my first appearance as tank. That was pretty sweet.