Spacehost

To quite Descartes: "Har har11! Sprite IS A WAit LAYMAR! 112"" I'm not sure it really matters you know, whether FF is truely turnbased or truelly realtime. No-one actually *wants* to see them rip up the battle system that served the series so well through until FFX...

Worms is turn-based with a time limit; FF is real-time, but you have to wait to input commands according to stats/ magic effects.

Yes, but the length of time between turns for both your characters and you opponents varies dynamically depending on various magic effects and items. It's not truely turn-based; you don't get a number of turns before the boss gets to hit you, if yer half-way through a turn and the boss gets his go, he'll clobber you while you're choosing something. It's a bit like how, in Tekken, you get to punch a guy, then it takes a certain amount of time for you to recover before you can do something new- it's just the "turns" are a lot faster than FF... Unlike in, say, Advance Wars, were everything is very polite and orderly and you take turns at bettering each other.

Have to try harder than that next time! Too bad they've not done the Online Ranking system for Twin Snakes, that was kinda fun...

How in *the hell* do you accidentally release a btea version of the engine for mastering? Unless the producers "accidentally" wanted to get the game out quicker and didn't care...

Few (if any) of HL's patches ever fixed any of the gameplay. None released in the past three years at any rate. And all of HL's recent patches have been bundled with big (>50MB) mods for no apparent reason, forcing those that want to play the game online to DL DMC or some other unwanted tat at the same time... And patching gameplay after release is even shoddier than patching the techincal bugs. At least those might not be discovered until several hundred game-hours; if developers won't even bother getting the gameplay right from the off, then where will we be? And who's to say gameplay patching is a good thing? Maybe I like, say, running about doing pistol headshots...

What? I got Deus Ex and Ico, two-for-£30, and three decent PC games for a tenner in Game. Show me an online retailer than can cope with my type of cheapskate impulse buying.

I still like wandering about a shop, picking what game to buy- c'mon, how many of you have bought anything other than a new release online?

Watched the trailer yet? "The bugs are back... And this time... It's DIFFERENT". I rest my case.

The only redeeming feature of the 2nd and 3rd films were the fact Agent Smith took a bigger billing that Neo half the time. He just stole every scene he was in. Don't know how the Wachowskis will repair their reputations after they managed to wreck The Best Franchise Ever. It seems like the limited budget of the first one kept it focussed, but on the 2nd and 3rd they just spunked it all away on masses of pointless tat, without really thinking through how to make a good film in the process...

They've got Mr. Vagrant Story/ FFT in charge of the project. We can but hope!

The GTA series all had 18 certs on them, did that stop me being bothered daily by my 13-year-old neighbour about how to finish GTA3? Certification- nice idea, shame parents are extremely stupid.

Re: those MGS2-to-GC issues. Given the absolute pig's ear of a port that was the XBox version (faster CPU, more RAM, better graphics hardware- hello? Framerate, where are you?), due (it seems) to the fact MGS2 was coded specifically to the PS2's "interesting" architecture, how do you think poor ol' Mr. Gamecube would handle it? Without a from-the-ground-up engine rewrite, I'd expect it would play an absolute arse.

And spend a lot of the game with next-to-no life, muttering to youself about why it's so unfair they didn't leave any health packs around before the boss fights. Which are annoying. Still, it's amasingly atmospheric, and, if anything, worth a look to point at certain bits and go "wow, what a great idea, wonder why no-one else has done that before".

It's meant to be a confused, I-don't-know-which-is-which face there, you know... not a sly dig. I'm not Alex W., you know!

THEY'RE ALL THE BLOODY SAME!

I'm talking about original MGS. Twin Snakes may well be idiotically dumb about saving settings. I think you can also safety aimed weapons with Y in TTS, I think I read it somewhere...

The settings are stored on your save game in the original, assuming you're not a muppet and go into the Options screen before loading up...

"Oi, Chris, how'd you get past that robot? No, it keeps shooting me. The what? Mustard?" Ah, point-and-click, you've been missed... BASS was pretty lovely tho. Hope ithe sequel's every bit as good as it could be!

Can you pop the thought-balloons MGS2-style and leave them wondering what they were doing?

Mwa? I remember *some* sort of sewer monster that was vaguely bear-like, but there were demon-children in the version I played...

*Checks clock* Aagh! Run!

Hee hee, prohibitive-shipping-costs-me-do!

Might have done both, actually, but I kbow they definately did 2.

NiN did the Quake II soundtrack I believe...