gaggle64

My god, I just watched the Giantbomb quicklook and this looks astonishing. The facial animations and fantastic acting are off the charts. The Guardian review was frothing at the mouth over it too. This has suddenly flown way up to very near the top of my list. Next time I treat myself it'll probably be this.

WHoo, jumped up two places into the final promotion slot, but only on goal difference. Gonna be a tight run to the end of the season.

What's happened here is Austrian billionaire, Red Bull co-founder and now circuit operator Dietrich Mateschitz has ordered his butler to creep stealthily through the bushes and deposit a very large sack with a dollar sign imprinted at Bernie's doorstep, fleeing back into the night before the hounds could be released. It could all just be coincidence of course, just like I could be an unusually dexterous parrot or possibly some breed of super intelligent marmoset writing this post right now. We just can't say for sure.

- A brand new, in-house Starfox game god dammit. - New console to have online service more akin to PSN or XboxLive, announcement immediately followed by public execution of those responsible for implementing friend codes in the first place - Any new Miyamoto-lead IP - That bad lady with the shrill voice who gives me nightmares gets locked in a sound proof cupboard. Forever. - Reggie gets shirtless - New Advanced Wars title

That's why I like you martin. You're a man of fine taste.

Couple of new trailers, one with a release date. Smelling a very heavy Tom Clancy/Modern Warfare-esque vibe all over it (note the familiar looking death mask). I am fine with this. Visually it looks like a fairly major step up from Ace Combat 6 and that still looks quite fine today. Launches October 11th. Cannot wait.

This whole discussion reminds me of when I used to play D&D with friends at school. I spent most of the time delegating stats and rules to someone else, rolling blindly and waiting for the DM tell me what just happened. I loved it - playing the characters with friends, engaging in the world as it arose, pushing situations just to see what happened. The stats & numbers and dice rolls were all a means to an end - to tell a story in a dynamic universe that, although couched in the D&D rulebook, was bound by nothing other then our own imaginations. Krakens, spiky metal witches and rock n' roll monks on desert caravans were just a few of the delights on our journey. We stood fast with and openly schemed against each other, D4s and 20s bouncing this way and that. The statistical intricacies and tactical nuances didn't really matter, even to the ones who knew them inside out - they were just there to represent the events. In Mass Effect, all I felt the incremental difference between each skill bar and meaninglessly huge inventory with it's myriad of parts and guns did was get in the way of the story and characters which, looking around at the vast piles of fan art and perverse discussion about Brandon Keneer's (Garrus) sonorous man voice, is clearly what has earned the game it's burgeoning following. I suspect that stat-based turn-based gaming made sense once because video games still weren't able to replicate complex combat and exploration situations. ME2 lets you raise enemies up and then blast them into the abyss at the touch of a button. There will always be games for people who like that sort of strategic stat-based nuance with a story, but those games have been increasingly niche titles for years now and I feel there's a reason for that.

I just don't feel that the fastest driver winning is a legitimate complaint against the driver. I know it's annoying when we want to see good ol' scrap for it and one man walks away with it but that's sport for you. F1 is a competition of the best car and best driver and Vettel in the Red Bull is clearly both - a car designed by the most successful designer in F1's history piloted by the man who became the youngest points scorer on his debut for BMW, later the youngest GP winner in a Torro Rosso (their previous best was 4th, again in Vettel's hands). It irks me greatly when people talk about world champions "not earning it" as if this sort of talent is some sort of common accident, like finding a ball of lint in your pocket. Edit: Hehe.

He's the youngest Champion ever, qualified 1st (an well ahead of his team mate) every race so far this year and won 6 of the last 8 races. Are you expecting him to do it blindfolded or something?

I like Vettel, I really do but he's becoming irritatingly good at this F1-thing. Lets hope somebody at least gives him a good run for his money before the end of the season.

Yes, that's right folks. Constructed 22 thousand years ago by an ancient and highly advanced civilisation that, overwhelmed by the computational power of it's new machine, fell into a mass depression and drank itself to death out of shame of it's inferior intellect, it's Supergrunch's Birthday! So lets all offer him a hearty congratulations, a fresh dusting off of his motherboard and the requisite virgin sacrifice to cheer on his vast pulsating brain to unlock all the secrets of the universe: How was everything created? What came before? Is there a higher power? What would a person rather have then a bowl of Coco Pops? Why do people keep agreeing to appear on the Jeremy Kyle show? And where the bloody hell is the clitoris anyway? *ahem* Happy Birthday Grunchie!

I'm leaning towards the latter. The most common complaint you hear is that voting "never changed anything." Now we've had a vote specifically to change something and most decided not to.

I'm delighted for the SNP success but the AV result although expected is still bitter, especially given the polls from no more then two or three months ago. Next person I meet who claims voting never changed anything is going to get vomited on.

Rather, I've been hearing that around and it's slightly frightening. It's all very well arguing against AV because you prefer another system for whatever reason, but if you genuinely think AV is "too complicated" you're probably the sort of person who's sole intellectual contact is with their goldfish. I have this image of the counters opening your ballot and being hurled against the wall by the rainbows and unicorns exploding from within.

Just finished reading the whole sad, sorry back story concerning Tati's estranged daughter, in relation to this movie, worth a read to add context to the film. I need a scotch.

Two more screenies, straight from the horses' mouth, looking hella sharp. I'm gonna be busting a gut waiting for this to be released, but Bioware have my trust. If it needs a few more calibrations, best just leave 'em to it.

Just finished watching Sylvian Chomet's The Illusionist, and as such have been compelled to sit in the dark trying to decide if I need to cry or simply drink heavily. Or both. It's quite an affecting movie to say the least.

I'll definitely be voting yes, I want more but a "no" vote will be kissing goodbye to any chance of any electoral reform for another generation at least.

Screen shots starting to float around now, for your convenience & pleasure -

Lots of Senna love over the last 24 hours, very understandably. This was the BBC evening newscast that I watched, May 1st 1994 burned into my memory, along with the incident itself. I was young at the time, the enormity of the man and his loss only becoming fully apparent to me later on but I remember it because of the obvious drama and outpouring of tragedy afterwards. I think I can recall Murray Walker commenting with Jonathan Palmer, thinking that he could see Senna’s head move inside the smashed cockpit. If it did, I never saw it.

Don't worry, I mean "camps" in a Andrew Marr-Question Time-Parliamentary sort of manner.

I'd agree with that and I think I have a foot in both camps. On the one hand there's no escaping that the sort of games I want to play are more so on my Xbox and my play time split between them demonstrates that. However I do still play my Wii, slowly chewing away on some of the few spare nights I have on the likes of Prime 3, Okami, Battalion Wars 2 and online Mario Kart as well as any number of trinkets from the VC. If anything I don't think Nintendo went far enough in reaching out to a wider audience with the Wii. It's been hugely commercially successful and a major part of that has been it's software aimed and marketed at "non-gamers" - Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Just Dance and similar titles. The direct result is now obvious across all the major platforms with Kinect and Playstation Move now central to each platform's commercial drive. What baffles is the rather disorganised manner this initial success has been further pursued by Nintendo with few decent "non-game" software titles and confuses me as to why they are now preping what sounds more like a more traditional games machine. Perhaps they see the likes of Kinect and feel Joe & Jane 8-6 will buy into a pricier, more complex product with the right titles but it still smacks of losing sight of the goal they set.