James

I briefly considered entering that, then realized that there's no chance I'd ever do it.

Smear all the quotes in great big fonts over some game cover or covers, or something that looks like it. OH, or over the Idle Thumbs website, and the visitor could click to get behind all the crap. Anyway, it's very important that you make it all pop. All of it. It must all simultaneously pop.

Noby Noby Ouroboros? Although I will admit to deliberately working towards earning trophies and achievements, I prefer them to be unexpected notifications of unusual events. Ideally, I'd like them to be a bit of interesting or amusing flavour on top of a more in-depth and dry stats system (depending on the game type, of course). For example, in an FPS you can have all the kills, deaths, shots fired, shots hit, etc., then perhaps have achievements for particular events like getting a certain number of guys with a single grenade or whatever. I don't know, that's just how I feel. It bothers me when there are ones I know I'll never get, which is weird, seeing as how I don't usually really go for getting them all, anyway. You're entitled to your opinion, of course, and it's an entirely understandable one, but I find it a little sad that people think that playing a game for its own sake is being "conned". Other elements are nice, of course, but shouldn't the main element of games, in most cases, be the gameplay? Goals can help focus people on particular forms of gameplay, which is good, but having a free-form environment is just as valid. I guess you could call it a toy instead of a game, and the "gameplay" would be another form of interaction, but to act as though the interaction itself is not reason enough to spend your time on something is to kind of undermine games entirely. Then again, you could make a case for people getting a bit caught up in the hype about something they wouldn't normally be too enthralled about. Yep. I've done it with a few types of animals, but not vegetables yet. You get a person with that animal's head. Also, if you eat all the parts of a robot separately, when you crap it out they're all joined together again. I like it when you crap some stuff out and it makes a cannon sound.

"FUCK YEAH!" - IGN.com ++

I decided to try the thing that apparently a whole load of CoD4 players did and launch straight into the multiplayer. It's a pretty cool guy. I have a clan with my PS3-owning friends, which will therefore remain small and completely ineffective, but we will all have the same letters before our names, referring to a dumb/awesome in-joke. I'm thinking we should challenge an ultra-hardcore clan. All three of us. When playing against bots, I was impressed with how cinematic and non-arcady things felt. I was on the dusty map with the all the long bridges, and the wind blowing all the dust and cloth bits around looked really impressive, and beyond that the way the bots moved seemed unusually unrobotic. I guess I didn't notice that as much when playing against humans, as you're not exactly going to convince people to role-play in an FPS, but I still quite liked that it was quite effective at being narratively involving as well as just engaging from a gameplay perspective. The problem I have with being purely focused on the gameplay is that at that stage you might as well take things to the extreme and be one of those guys who runs around in a bunch of abstract untextured shapes in Quake 3. Which is fine, but not what I want. The replay stuff is pretty interesting, too. For example, you can see how much effect the spawn delay can have on the number of people in play at any one time. During the first match that I watched, at one point the ISA were down to one man. While actually playing the game, I would have just assumed everyone was elsewhere (I suppose you could see on the spawn map, but I tend to be paying more attention to the spawn points and getting straight back into things). I'm definitely still getting used to it, and finding my reactions even slower than normal, so it's a bit frustrating. I used to be pretty OK at CoD4 on the PS3 for a while, but then I lost Internet for a couple of months and when I came back either everyone had got better, all the bad people had left, I'd gotten worse, or a combination of the three. In this round I did OK. That's probably because everybody else sucked or something. I'm #4, if you're interested. EDIT: It doesn't seem to be updating my stuff properly. It's just zapping me from one death position to the next. Weird. Disappointing. I wonder if it's because I was spawning on my friend who was my squad leader. Yeah, it only seems to show when I sawn from the base. In this game I was the squad leader, so I should be visible all the time, but I did less well, so I'm not going to show you it. OH WAIT, I JUST DID. I'm #13 YOU CAN READ IT WITH YOUR EYES.

AAAAAAAAH!™

You are the Pete. The Pete collective. The Pete continuum. A waveform of Peteness. A Möbius strip of Petitude. I should be working.

Yeah everybody, stop being dicks and join in. BROS BEFORE HOS/JOBS. Seriously though, as much as I enjoy getting to know Mr. 495 and Mr. Vania so intimately, I do miss having things a bit more populated for some of the modes, and it's clearly all about keeping me happy. But if it can't be helped, it can't be helped. DICKS.

I am consumed by disappointment. Will it just be three of us again?

BOY HOWDY. JOIN US.

That's wonderful.

I had a quick look, and it seems to be recognizing it, and I'd set it as the first boot device, but it kept telling me to insert a boot disk. I'm pretty sure the drive is crap, though. When I was using it in its previous computer I had to resort to sharing my really old computer's DVD drive over the network and installing things that way, which is dumb. When I get home I'll try another disc, though, and perhaps the drive from my really old computer (I'd rather leave that thing functional, and I'd rather not have any IDE ribbons in the new one, but I guess that's better than buying a new SATA drive only to discover something else was the problem). Incidentally, it now seems to run fine through the DVI cable. I find that really puzzling. The only other thing I changed was putting the sides on the case (I'd left them off previously, thinking I might need to tinker). It shouldn't even know whether it's open or closed, should it? I guess I'll give a few things a try before buying anything. First I'll try disabling all other boot devices (not sure why that fix anything, but it's worth a try). Then I'll try another Windows disc. Then I'll try the IDE drive, I guess. If the latter works, I'll buy a new SATA drive, I think.

It turns out using a VGA adaptor on the DVI cable solved the problem. I'm not sure why. Anyway, the ridiculous angst above is testament to my embarrassing incompetence. Now all I need to do is convince it to run some damn software. An old drive with Vista on it is stuck in an eternal loop of attempted self-repair, and for some reason it's refusing to boot from the DVD drive of the dead PC. That thing was always a bit shit, though. I should buy a new one. I might try the one from my other functional PC, but I'd rather leave it there. Anyway, that's all for another day. While I have your waning attention, what's a good or acceptable temperature for the CPU and associated environs? I'd like to check that all my cooling stuff is set up OK. Thank you for wasting your time in this dumb thread. I appreciate it.

You're the second person I've come across who's be playing a Backlog game at the same time as them for purely coincidental reasons. Weird. Well OK, it's not that strange.

Crap. I've set up a system pretty similar to the one Scrobbs described, plugged everything in, and all I get is a blank screen, fans and LEDs. Does the P5Q-E have an in-built speaker, or will I have to hook one up to hear diagnostic beeps? I didn't see any mention of either a speaker or a connection for one in the manual, so I'm not really sure about that. I'm hoping it's something simple, but I suspect I might have fucked up pretty badly somewhere in setting everything up. No beeps and no activity is a pretty bad sign, I take it. Is my only option to take it to a shop and face further expense, or is this salvageable? Well, I guess it's impossible to say with so little information, but some pointers would be nice. I'd have experimented a bit more myself, but it's a bit of a bastard getting around in that thing. It seems like all the components are giant monsters these days, leaving even less space to work with than I remember. I actually cut myself rooting around in there, so you can understand my reluctance to pull it all apart and start again (I don't think I bled on anything, but I guess that would explain it). I'll try disconnecting some stuff tomorrow, but I don't have it in me to stay up late trying to diagnose what might already be a deceased patient. Another prospective problem, but one I don't think would be this fatal, is that I've only plugged in 4 pins to the EATX12V thing. The manual recommends all 8, but by that stage there was already stuff in the way, making it hard to remove the cap over half of it which I'd only just noticed. I read elsewhere online that it can manage with either. I had a feeling this might not go according to plan. PCs have it in for me. Or I just do something evil to them without realizing it. If anyone can stop this ruining my week, and many weeks to come, I'd be very happy. Or just tell me what the internal speaker situation is. That'd be nice, too. Shit. EDIT: It could, of course, be something as simple as the display connection (for some reason DVI seems too high-tech to work straight away, in my mind), which would be delightful, but the screen doesn't go into standby mode as it does when it's not getting any signal, so something seems to be coming through, which suggests the right thing is specifically not coming through. I've tried both DVI ports. I guess I ought to try another video card, but I really don't want to be tearing apart the one PC I have that actually works. At least, not until I get another one working. Also, the sound card is from a dead PC. Could that stop the whole thing from working at all? I'd have guessed not, but I've been surprised before. I guess I could just use the on-board sound, really. OH I DON'T KNOW. What are the odds it's something simple, non-fatal and inexpensive?

Did you play it for the Rebel FM backlog thing?

I could have sworn I already posted about this thing. Anyway, I've encountered this thing a few times, and absolutely love it. In a not-entirely-ironic fashion, even. It's so endearingly demented. The Most Wanted Music counterpart, on the other hand, is plain boring. Anyway, I take it as an amusing satire on creation-by-focus group. THANKS FOR THE INSIGHT, JAMES. Moron.

Hahahahaha. I never thought of it that way. I do collect dismembered body parts in Fallout 3. I keep them in my fridge with all the food and Nuka-Colas.

I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for the brain-meltingly inane drivel I sometimes come out with over the voice chat. I can't help it. It's a compulsion.

Yep. Oh crap, now I want a Children of Men-esque Half-Life 2 film. Can it be done? Without suckage?

On the as-yet-unnoticed third hand, you're quite near the end! Don't give up now! On a supplementary fourth hand, Mario Galaxy is a good game too, so whatever.

Tangent: seeing him supporting Mogwai in the Royal Albert Hall. I since got an album of his and wasn't completely into it, but the juxtaposition between the music and the venue made a lot of sense (as did Mogwai's music). I should see more stuff there.

And it have concave analogue stick heads! Not that I had any (I never even had any pre-PS3 PlayStations), but I did read up about them once, when trying to remember what type of controller a friend of mine had very early on.

I don't think start, select, the PS button or the D-pad are. Give us our analogue start button! I want part of a start menu! Or maybe it should put things in slow-motion. Anyway, I'm quite enjoying going through one flower at a time. I think if I burnt through it faster like I would a normal game it might lose some of its charm. And yeah, I use R2. Oh, and I used to think <3 might be an arse, but now accept that it's a heart.

"The levels of awesome in this game have shaken my belief in the conservation of energy." - IGN.com I don't know.