James

On one level I understand this, but on another level I don't see how it really leads to any tangible gains. Perhaps it's just a pride thing. I can't imagine many end consumers are going to be procuring the services of a middleware company, and those who do employ middleware technology almost certainly learn about it elsewhere. I suppose you could make an argument for that particular technology being a selling point, and that selling point driving sales of further games using it, but I don't think that point is strong enough to sustain the degree to which we're forced to look at the logos. How about having the logos unskippable whilst installing or when the game is first launched, and skippable thereafter? You can't guarantee everyone will be paying attention, of course, but most people ignore that stuff, anyway.

I loved RE4, so I'm OK with most of the problems people have with 5. My main concern is that the 360 version looked noticeably better to me than the PS3 version, but I'm going to have to get the PS3 version if I want to do any online co-op with my friends. Once you're actually playing the game it doesn't really matter, but it will always be at the back of my mind, particularly since the graphics were one of the main things to strike me very early on. Still, I'm looking forward to it with interest. Weirdly, I found the demo harder in co-op. I don't know if it's just because the friend I tried it with didn't know what he was doing, or because the AI partner is really good, or that they scale the difficulty, or if it's easier when you don't have to worry about trading ammo as much, or the bigger screen made things clearer (we were playing in split-screen), or what. Finally, it seems like you can't trade weapons if you're playing with another human. That seems idiotic. I can understand them wanting to avoid people fucking each other up, but putting a gun in your partner's inventory is no more destructive than dumping some ammo or a herb in there. It just seems bizarre, and leads to weird stuff like vaulting Sheva onto a rooftop to snipe people with her SMG while you run around engaging people in close quarters with your sniper rifle. Obviously in that situation you'd generally use your pistol over a rifle, but it highlights a missed opportunity for some cool forward planning and co-ordination with your partner. Perhaps that will be changed. It can easily be done. Or perhaps there's a really obvious reason for it that I'm overlooking. I say "seems" too much. I'm too tired to correct it or work out whether this post goes anywhere.

An interesting point (and now that I think about it, I've encountered that when playing Left 4 Dead), but wouldn't it be possible to skip this stage when launching a game if the player is already signed in, reserving it purely for occasions when the player suddenly gets signed out, or launches without the appropriate account? On the PS3 I don't believe it's possible to switch accounts without quitting the game (which might possibly be the result of in-game XMB not being an original feature). You can of course lose your connection with PSN, but in my experience that either leaves you in-game or throws you back to the previous menu. I wonder if the press start screens serve as much of a purpose on the PS3, or if they're just there for the sake of keeping things similar. On a similar note, something else which irritates me, but which I fully understand the purpose of, is unskippable logos and legal tat when launching a game. What I find a bit bizarre is how they vary in their skipability. If one company is happy for you not to have to stare at their corporate stuff for a couple of seconds, why isn't another? Could that ever make a significant practical difference? I suppose it could be masking loading, but a main menu shouldn't take long to load (games that launch you straight into the action are an obvious exception). It seems kind of obnoxious. It's like making a reader sit down for a couple of seconds to stare at the author's name before he can enjoy his book of choice. He knows who wrote the damn book already!

The other videos from the "GF plays..." series are pretty entertaining, too. It seems like Counter Strike was the only one she didn't really enjoy. Interesting.

But think of all that awesome menu art that would be slightly obscured by having an actual menu in front of it! Think of how aesthetically enriched the fraction of a second before you impatiently hammer on the start button is! No, yeah, it's daft.

Between us we can offer you anything a date can, with the possible exception of a vagina.

In HMV it comes with vouchers for paintballing! I think my friend ordered that. I'll be interested to see how his reaction compares with the ones here.

That was a highlight? That was a highlight! It was a little muted, but there were still some entertaining moments. And I've discovered a love of mêlée, so that's something. Isn't it, Mr Vania?

It took me about two hours to get into work, but providing that I get home before whenever I'm up for some partakerage (not a word).

Slashdot has a post about Chris' interview with Ubisoft concerning Far Cry 2. From a cursory glance, people aren't impressed. Of course, that's just some guy's opinion, and he does go on to offer some specific criticisms. I just saw it and thought it was funny. HEY CHRIS, STOP BEING SO GAY IN THE MOUTH. Not really; I'm playing Far Cry 2 at the moment and quite enjoying it. So basically the point is this thread is "GAMING WEBSITE HINTS AT OPINION; INTERNET DISAGREES". Gee, thanks for that breaking news, James. Dick.

It took me a moment to work out exactly what my problem with it was. At first I thought perhaps it suggested some sort of worrying insanity, but then I realized it was more a kind of sad attempt at sounding impressive. I guess how I feel about it depends on context. Scientists and programmers seem to be forever coming up with "amusing" acronyms, which I guess I can tolerate, but when it's the people in charge of the world, perhaps working out a way to phrase something such that it spells another word -- particularly one as long as 'patriot' -- cheapens the whole affair quite significantly. It's like delivering the news of the economic crisis in the form of a haiku. It doesn't seem appropriate. So I guess there is something vaguely worrying about it, after all -- it's ultimately a frivolous and humorous device (regardless of how funny this implementation actually is) being applied to a matter completely devoid of frivolity or humour. But it's also sad. Like a dad trying to impress his son's friends with crap jokes and dated cultural references. Perhaps you're right, and they have ideas of 1960s spy glamour. This is international espionage! We're sending James Bond to take out Osama Bin Laden! He'll do the job and have time left over to bed a bevy of women on the way! It'll be so cool!

OK, thanks, I'll take a look at that. My broken PC actually had two graphics cards in SLI, but I think they may have been the source of its woes. Then again, that's more of a hunch than anything concrete.

Unfortunately, my friends who are into gaming are even less PC-centric than me. I've built a couple of PCs before, but it was a very long time ago, and I feel like I don't really know what's good any more. Anyway, I might start a thread about it rather than derailing this one further. What I forgot to mention in my original post is that part of the reason I'd favour a PC version is that the vertical sensitivity on the PS3 demo seemed really high, and I couldn't find separate controls for each axis. I can understand having greater horizontal sensitivity, what with most things happening on a horizontal plane, but emphasising vertical movement made things feel weird and twitchy. It wasn't intolerable, but it was irritating. Perhaps it was a deliberate ploy to make the player more jumpy or something; if so, it's a really bizarre one. I suspect it's me just being overly picky about something that's fine with most people. Anyway, I'd feel happier with a mouse.

I had FEAR, but I never got that far into it because my PC couldn't really manage to make it look nice, and I got distracted by other things. I quite liked the demo to the sequel, but if I were to get it, I'd probably get it for the PC, and I'm actually on the same PC that couldn't quite do the original justice, but now with a bigger monitor that would require a higher resolution and therefore put a much greater strain on the resources. I did actually buy a new PC since then, but it broke and I failed to do anything about it. PCs are so frustrating. I really want to get back into PC gaming, but every time I try I'm disappointed by hardware problems. Things never seem to function as they should. Still, I'm thinking of having another go, soon. Because, you know, this is exactly the time to be buying expensive electronics.

"Roll around on the floor screaming in agony, 'cause you just got burned."

There's something vaguely pathetic about backronyms.

I was, for a while, making quite frequent reference to anti-intellectualism, but recently I've been trying to avoid it, as it implies I think I'm an intellectual. Still, that's pretty much the best term for it. Apparently, thinking is bad. People are chided for "thinking too much" about things, as though they devote days of their life to doing nothing but thinking, perhaps sitting in a bare room on a solitary chair or stool. I'll readily admit that I spend more time inside than I ought, but I don't sit around straining for thoughts. People just react to information with thoughts, and then react to those thoughts with further thoughts. But that's sad, so let's go get drunk and hit and/or sexually abuse each other. One of the many things I eventually omitted from my previous post, for fear of sounding like a tit: Do these people think that developers just crap out games on a whim? "Dude, we should totally make a dude who shoots a dude and the dude bleeds from his neck!" "OK, let's do it!" "OK, we've done it, now we're rich!" I'm sure the degree each developer pursues the whole "theory" angle varies greatly, but wanting ever superior sequels without wanting a culture in which people properly consider how things are the moment, and the implications thereof, is pretty ridiculous. I don't mean to be grandiose. It's just frustrating that there's so much potential in the medium, and a whole bunch of people seem almost scared of it. Variety is good!

Yeah, that's terrible. What's worse, though, is that all the responses I have to that statement sound astoundingly pretentious. I guess when you're in an environment that assumes games are a fundamentally childish activity, having any sort of ambitions or hopes for them beyond better graphics and bigger guns will seem pretty hoity-toity. It's not like I want games to preach Kantian ethics at me or anything; I just feel like there's scope for more than that. But apparently anything that isn't immediately fun is impermissible. Actually, that's something that bothers me in a more general sense: the idea that anything enjoyable or satisfying has to be fun. Fun isn't the only positive reaction we can have to a thing. You might as well claim that food can't taste good if it isn't sweet. Oh shit, I was trying to avoid sounding pretentious. Sorry.

In the unlikely event that you haven't already, you should probably check out Shawn Elliott's recent-ish symposium thingy. That covers similar sort of territory. Not long after that went up, Shawn posted a link on his Twitter to a forum thread in which some guy was basically having a go at him for being pretentious and navel-gazing and so on. I find it kind of depressing how whatever you do can either be dismissed as blind idiocy or arrogant pretension. Anyway, I thought it was pretty interesting.

You could call it a "face clef". People might think less of you for it, though.

What, like a prosthesis? Is that the "adult entertainment" equivalent of lying on your CV?

Double post! Now with video! Click for the YouTube version,* in which I continue my trend of ripping off n0wak, in this instance replacing my obnoxious voice with music. I do hope there's some salvageable video of it from a better angle, but it's fun to remember the short period of time in which I thought I'd missed, and the following realization. Speaking of salvaging video, I presume it should be possible to convert your stuff to something everything can read, n0wak, given that something can already. Theoretically, anyway. I don't know if it's a codec issue, or something more intrinsically tied to the software. If it's the latter, I guess it might be difficult to find an alternative that works. Shit. Did you determine what caused the problem? * Or you could just click the text link instead, if you're against fun and for kicking babies. Or are the two mutually exclusive?

I actually feel very slightly bad about that. I'll never get anywhere in life with such a considerate attitude! In light of this, my revised opinion on the matter is: "fuck you; eat dust" Kudos for sticking with Mr Tasty throughout, though.

I quite liked flOw, even if it was more of an experience than a game. I'm certainly looking forward to Flower and Nobi Nobi Boy. The meta-game stuff of the latter sounds pretty interesting.

If I do nothing else with my life, at least I will have been responsible for that.