Denial

I think one problem is that one of the goals of the project was to recreate the feel of Duke Nukem 3D (even as another was to create the best modern-age FPS out there - you can't say George Broussard doesn't think big). But part of the feel of DN3D relied on gaming being a minority pursuit almost exclusively pursued by young men, and also was kind of saved by the technical limitations of the time. Case in point - the naked women stuck in biomechanical ooze and begging to be killed in DN3D were a bit iffy anyway (although the Aliens pastiche was very clear). But in DNF, the evolution of the engine and the space for sound files means that you've got a level where I don't think any of those things - - are things that should automatically be off-limits in games. I think they could all be done well. But in a balls-out crude comedy where you've just climbed through a giant alien rectum, complete with exploding piles, I think it's a very difficult balance to strike, and probably one you're better off not trying to strike. The whole Holsom Twins thing is odd on a bunch of levels. I wrote up the launch party, which was very well-managed but sort of put a lampshade on some of the things that are odd about the game... selflink here, if anyone's interested, because it's quite long and ramblomatic.

"To begin your free 30-day trial of Qriocity, please enter your credit card details." Hang on a second....

The gratuitous Miranda Lawson shots and the broken zip on her costume are a bit embarrassing, although certainly faithful to the comic books (where Brubaker's zipped-up reboot has had her zip pulled progressively further down over time), but the kiss... really, Selina. You don't know where he's been.

Just done a bunch of adding... my public ID is areadenial...

My public account (which does not reveal that I just play Rumble Roses for 10 hours a day) is DNyeal. It's all about the PC at the moment, but there's always GFWL! Eh, guys? Guys?

The jeeps crashing out of the jungle did seem odd - in the sense that it seemed counter-intuitive for people to drive right up to your jeep and put themselves right under your guns, where you can chew them up almost immediately. I wished the opponents were smarter, generally - they're good on cover and artificially good at sniping, but not great at flanking or suppression. Then again, if they were better at that then the repopulation of the guard posts would be yet more frustrating - whereas at least you can generally either barrel through, stopping later to gun down the guys chasing you in cars (who really seem to be short of a plan .

The PC version is out tomorrow in the UK. I've been playing it for a couple of days... I put a lot of time into Fable 3 on XBox, and generally enjoyed it, but it's definitely a Fable game - the combat isn't hardcore at all, and even on the "challenging" mode on PC it only really gets dangerous when there are too many enemies on screen for you to be able to roll out of the way successfully. In terms of which platform it's best on - well, it's prettier on the PC, at high detail settings, and keyboard shortcuts de-hassle some elements, but it's not a hugely different experience. The mouse feels oddly extraneous to most of the gameplay, and much of the time I found myself navigating the world using the Fahrenheit controls - WASD to move, arrow keys to rotate the camera. I played with the idea of remapping the mouse buttons to the keyboard also, which works basically for everything except targeted firearms combat (which uses right click to aim and left-click). That said, although it's fun to go for headshots and to knock weapons out of people's hands, that and shooting gallery sections are the only real applications for aiming, and I reckon you could get by without if you didn't occasionally have to sharpshoot a gnome or a button. The other time the mouse really comes into its own is the map screen, which feels a lot smoother than the 360 version, and the shortcuts also really speed this along. Generally, I actually like the way Fable games tend to let the combat get out of the way of the story - this isn't Battlefield, and it's never going to be - but it suffers from the same problem as Fable 2 - the narrative is stretched out by really, really long strings of enemies to be dispatched. Several times during the game moving to the next bit of the plot involves walking through tunnels interspersed with arenas, and although the combat is fun and nicely animated it's still Fable-style two-button combat (select melee/ranged/magic, attack with left mouse, block/aim/splash with right). By the midgame I found myself often just holding down the magic splash button to charge up a damage/immobilise attack, releasing it and repeating until everyone around me was dead - which is slightly harder on hardcore mode, because you don't autoheal and have to take out ranged combatants to avoid being picked off, but is still not impossible. I'd like most of the combat to be optional the way that switching outfits or getting married is largely optional; there's a beautifully constructed world, with really good writing, voice acting and art direction (if you like that kind of thing) but between the scripted and the wandering-monster combat events sometimes it feels like you're wading through it a bit.

That's very true - I think I rationalised it to myself on the grounds that

I actually liked the To be honest, I found myself playing for the narrative, the aesthetics and the character notes rather than the gameplay itself, quite often. Which was still fun, but in the single-player mode it still feels like, however many extra elements there are, they still need to be assembled in a single, particular way in most cases. It's almost like a crossword where getting the elements in the right place is the game, and bouncing triumphantly through them is just the bit at the end where you look at the completed crossword with satisfaction. Without the novelty of the whole setup, which was such a kick in Portal, it felt like quite a "cool" experience, in a McLuhany way - sometimes more like a participatory movie than a pure gaming experience. I'm looking forward to spending more time on the 2-player, which seems like a more chaotic and immediate experience.

But... portals are so hot right now.

Dude, Angry Birds is about suicide bombing. Tiny Wings, on the other hand, is joy in a phone. And has a lovely blue sky.

There's a level 2? Hardcore. (I am wondering whether this would be easier with two keyboards... must try that...)

I'd definitely be up for this, although I tried single-playering Cold Stream and got lost, so might need a bit of practice.

Sorry I missed this - I was evangelising it to my friends, but the whole thing came to a crashing halt with the realisation that it started at 6, and the booby prize of working that day was a chance to see Charles S Dutton punch an alien in the face. I do not want to see Charles S Dutton punch an alien in the face.

There needs to be a Dead Islandifier - which runs YouTube videos backwards in slow motion with occasional intense moments of discordant noise and violent action. Even without it, this is the most disturbing trailer I've seen. More than Dead Island. More than Dead Space 2. More than Kirby's Unexpected Bereavement. Weirdly, the sudden static at the end with the multiple choice endings does feel like the bit where the marine's helmet camera cuts suddenly to static when they are killed by an alien, introducing an unexpected survival horror element to proceeedings.

I realise it's caused by a deeply annoying situation, El Muerte, but that double thumbs down review of PSN support made me actuaLOL.

Will also listen to the last one, Jon. I... write a bit, I guess? Partly about gaming. And I guess I unspool on my blog, over here, where the value of solid editors probably becomes very clear very quickly.

Oh, wow. Stay Alive. I love a terrible film about an entertainment the creators barely understand - I've seen Mazes and Monsters, damn it - but I couldn't sit through this one. Not even the hope that something awful might happen to Cody Banks kept me in the game. Didn't they end up discovering that you can avoid being killed by the eldritch forces in the Video game by pressing pause?

I genuinely had to hit the bank job about a dozen times, and only my addiction to narrative progression kept me going. It's the sort of pointless difficulty spike that gets right up my nose, and is also very Rockstar - like the skydiving mission in GTA3:San Andreas. Theoretically, that should be really James Bond fun - you have to fly out over the ocean, find a plane, stalk it and freefall onto it before killing every last motherlover inside - but it becomes the game demanding that you do something very well that the game itself does very badly, in order to progress. In the end, once you've nailed it, you don't feel like a badass - you just feel relief that you haven't wasted the effort investment.

I liked Dead Rising a lot - couldn't really feel as much affection for DR2. The Mall environment and the baffled but phlegmatic Frank West were the real draws, it seems. But then, I really like zombies - the zombie crackhouse in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines I found absolutely play-with-the-sound-off terrifying. I did a blog post about the trailer, the salient points of which I think are: 1) There's no way that atmosphere is going to be captured in the game, because you just can't do that for 10-20 hours. 2) I'm pretty confident that you aren't going to be given the opportunity to kill children - even zombie children - in the game. Could be wrong, but. Also, if somebody tells you based on an alpha build that something is going to be a lot like Fallout, proceed with caution. Really nice trailer, though.

I have to confess to not having given Dragon Age the love it needs, also - I put in about 30 hours, and hit a wall due to some poor choices (trying to be a good guy when my one source of secure income was robbing people, primarily). But I do want to go back, maybe to the start, because so much about that game is right. And I love the genre-savvy Grey Warden. What I'd like to quit right now is Minecraft. It's eating into my other-game time quite badly, and I'm not creating a player piano or a voxel replica of the Sagrada familiar - I'm just methodically hollowing out a mountain to build a vast underground lair with a glass ceiling, in order to grow wheat in the centre of the Earth. This is exactly why I had to be stern with myself about Dwarf Fortress.

Of course, if Patrick Stewart had started demanding of the writers that Jean-Luc Picard called Doctor Crusher a feminazi in every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, that would have been a very different matter. I think that over time opinions might have hardened against that five-year mission.

OK! Let's start with actors. Patrick Stewart plays Jean-Luc Picard, but we are pretty sure he isn't actually the captain of a starship. Patrick Stewart also plays "Patrick Stewart" in the sitcom Extras, but we're still pretty clear that that's a performance - that if we meet Patrick Stewart he won't actually be obsessed with ladies' clothes falling off. Ricky Gervais is also playing a character in Extras, called Andy Milman. The character of Andy Milman has quite a bit in common with the character of David Brent in The Office, and the character of "Ricky Gervais" in Ricky Gervais' stand-up. They aren't the same character, but they are self-absorbed, socially inept and lack empathy. You can speculate from that that this is what Ricky Gervais is like in real life, but it's going to be speculation, because your access to not-performing Ricky Gervais is very limited. Mike Stoklasa isn't Harry Pliskett - they have different names, and Mike Stoklasa doesn't abduct and murder women. However, if you watch the epic dissections of the Star Wars prequels delivered by the persona of "Harry Pliskett", it's reasonably safe to assume that Mike Stoklasa genuinely doesn't like the Star Wars prequels, and the stuff he is saying about how they are scripted and shot is basically what he believes, delivered through a comic persona. I mentioned Michael Richards earlier. He's an actor and stand-up comic. When he played Kramer in Seinfeld, the audience knew that wasn't Michael Richards. When they went to see Michael Richards in stand-up, the audience weren't expecting to see Kramer, but they also weren't expecting to see Michael Richards making tea and watching telly for half an hour - they were expecting a half-hour performance by Michael Richards as "Michael Richards". When Michael Richards lost his rag at some hecklers and started shouting racist abuse at them, arguably that was something being done by "Michael Richards", the stand-up comedy persona. But, you know, so what? It was a decision made by Michael Richards, the guy, about what to do in that situation. And if Michael Richards had decided backstage that this is what his stand-up persona would do if he was heckled... well, that was a really bad plan. Public figures (even for niche markets) simplify elements of their personality, leave out others. However, they are still accountable for what those public personas do and say, and that relationship is clearly different from the relationship between Patrick Stewart and Jean-Luc Picard. That said, I'm not sure this is particularly significant. There's very little chance that this is going to result in anything more than some convention drama, because the words he used are words you can get away with using as insults used against women in public, at least in gamer culture (probably not at the National Organisation for Women); enough people won't care - and enough other people will be actively supportive or amused - for it not to be a big problem.

Although, now that I think about it, Doctor Strange met Tom Wolfe in his comic. So maybe it's more likely than I think.

I for one firmly support the contention that Kurt Vonnegut never met Bruce Wayne. If anyone disagrees, they need to proof that shit up.