Raff

The greatest piece of music ever written: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wufos0c_7Rw

That's its full price apparently. I just bought it for 10 euros on Steam then saw that it's €2.48 (!!!) on gamersgate, on a 75% off sale. http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-CRYO/cryostasis-sleep-of-reason

That ad is one of the best I've seen. Can you beat level 1 of the all-new counter-strike wizard mmo? What on earth can that possibly link to?

Warcraft 2 was my favourite game when I was about 9 years old. My brother and I would repeatedly borrow it from my sister's friend's older brother who must have been a big PC game guy (parents would never buy us games, we just borrowed them and played shareware that would occasionally run on my Dad's PC). Never played it online, only ever campaign. The tone, music and voices and art were just so spot on. The warcraft games since then just don't appeal to me in the same way. I'm really indifferent to the 3D WC3/WoW graphics that most people seem to love and the atmosphere just doesn't seem to be there. I played a fair bit of WC3 tower defence with a friend but couldn't get on with the rest of it. Adventures doesn't really fill me with nostalgia either, which is odd. I suppose what I like so much about WC2 is extremely specific even though I can't quite nail it down. The only game that came close to WC2 for me was Warwind, another RTS from the same era the apparently only I played. There were loads of really cool little things that made it different from WC2, like how units could go inside buildings, and you could build roads and bridges. I found it incredibly spooky and dark at the time, even though there were loads of wacky touches. One of the races had 3 legs and 3 boobs, their workers would build stuff by punching their suddenly pneumatic fists against the walls, and they had units that rode motor tricycles in an otherwise ethereal fantasy setting.

I really really liked this game, and I'm someone who normally doesn't like linear scripted FPSs. I never finished Half Life 1 or 2 because they just became dull very quickly to me (although the episodes were ok). Metro seems to get the balance perfectly in terms of the extent of the scripting and the linearity or percieved linearity of the level design. I LOVED the bits where you can stealth through Deus Ex style. That and all the beautiful attention to detail of the visuals, and the PERFECT length, meant that I actually finished the thing and felt really good about it.

Last night I completed Deus Ex for the first time. I first played it in about 2003 (age 14), got hopelessly stuck in Area 51 (so close!) and gave up but have always considered it one of my favourite games since. Now I feel a little less guilty.

Hi. Apparently this is where they keep the people who like Idle Thumbs the most, so I registered. Raff