~Steve

nabeel

Actually, I’d never considered that. Scrooge atones for his past sins and completes his spiritual salvation by way of material purchase? Was Dickens was a tool of the Corporate Conspiracy or what?

Funnily enough, I can get over the security nonsense and general broken bits, but the performance drives me up the wall. The first game that my current machine hasn’t been able to deal with, and it runs like a dog. Don’t talk to me about multithreading, optimisation or resolution, just get your game running at a decent frame rate before I spend my readies on it.

An admission: I have started using the full health and armour cheat during tough missions. I just don’t have the time or volition to play through a mission, die ten seconds from the end, and begin again not from the start, but from ten minutes before the start. So sorry, but no shame here, I just want to finish the game without tearing my own throat out.

L4D reminds me of AudioSurf. Dead simple, different for every user every time they play it, low production values but so beautifully simple and well-pitched that it could never be anything but a smash. Ditto Portal. Valve rule.

“Kieron: I could have a series of columns called “Staring At My Girlfriend”. That won’t be creepy, at all.”

At least not as creepy as someone else writing a series called “Staring at your girlfriend”

I think that’s Jamie McKelvie’s initial design document for Phonogram Series 3, isn’t it?

I could have a series of columns called “Staring At My Girlfriend”. That won’t be creepy, at all.

Be sure to have some alcohol to ensure a good read.

Plus you get to kill Zombies in an FPS that isn’t some awful http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/forum/CS mod. Nuff said.

The one bad thing I can say about it is the farcical implementation of game finding. Why the hell I can’t assemble my friends together in a lobby and then choose to join my own bloody server is beyond me. Indeed Valve’s approach to the game joining functionality is a question I’d love you RPS loons to put to Valve.

Now I just want someone to make an Aliens mod for it. Mmmm just the thought of me and my Pulse Rifle trying to survive against hordes of Aliens makes me happy.

Oh and: if you’re not playing on Expert you’re not a real man.

That the wire stood head and shoulders above any other cop show on TV had more to do with the quality of the contemporary TV cop shows than anything else. Similarly that it stands head and shoulders above any other serialised, prime time drama says more about that sort of TV than anything else. I don’t want to denigrate the wire (or invoke a backlash against it, for that matter) but the original treatment, which was a novel, would have failed utterly to turn any heads in the world of modern fiction because in terms of “breadth and quality of characterisation” it would fail to compete with what was already on offer.