LOLCHRIST

I second World of Goo. Best game of 2008 in my opinion. The others I don't know much about.

100% of both CPU cores indicates to me that there is a thread (well, at least 2 threads) waiting in an infinite loop. Bad luck, hope one of the appropriate companies fixes this for you.

I like it, and have been using it since it came out. It really needs an advert blocking tool though, Vibrant Media Intellitxt is driving my mad - that's the one that double underlines a load of words and pops up a video if your mouse happens to go near one of them. I did find out that you can kill flash from Chrome's task manager (shift + esc), which is help with some adverts.

Well to be honest the combat doesn't work very well in KoToR or Neverwinter or Planescape Torment. Tactics just don't seem to be of us in any of those compared to spamming Force Speed / Isaac's Pleb Storm / That Spell Wot Makes You Shoot Blue Bolts. But I don't think that's anything to do with the camera perspective. Meanwhile Mass Effect actually is an action RPG and it works very well with a few exceptions (fighting in the Mako is too easy, attack of the floating tripods is dumb).</

Perhaps you should try looking up the error code? Other than that Microsoft have a debugger tool you can download to figure out what is happening when things in general go wrong. Having eliminated the software, the file, and the medium, you're left with drivers, firmware and hardware as the possible problems I would say. Does the drive play CDs and DVDs properly?

Slow real time worked very well in the Europa Universalis games and I'd been hoping that someone would expand on that for a while. Sins was a very pleasant surpise (Stardock seem to be systematically targetting the genres I love), and the result is very good. Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance is excellent in that regard too. Since they nerfed mass fabricators and improved extractors, the game has become very much about territorial control. That means that, rather than having a long b

It ended up pricing it as £2.60 for me, which would be correct at the current exchange rates (damn failing currency), so I think it must be localizing the price correctly? Either that or it's actually charging me in dollars and that's just there for reference. Either way it's a great deal and I'm enjoying Space Rangers.

It's fixed. I shall pick up Space Rangers 2 I think, that's a great deal. I already own World of Goo, and would strongly recommend it to everyone. Best game of 2008.

All RTS = Tetris? Nonsense. Having games slowly build up tension and then unleash it in a furious crescendo is a fairly standard pacing trick. It can be used in TBS games too. Hell, it can be used in a book.

Yes. :) Homeworld 2 is definitely the easiest to play, but the story in the first Homeworld was magic. The Garden of Kadesh/Cathedral of Kadesh levels may well be my favourite of any game. Edit: When I say easiest to play, I meant that as a compliment. They ironed out the UI a bit for Homeworld 2. Relic are still making great games of course: Dawn of War and Company of Heroes really breathed life into the RTS genre. I have heard that the people responsible for Homeworl

[quote who="Leauki" reply="10" id="1911841"]What I would want to see in Windows 7: 3. Support for Java by installed by default on every machine, client or server. [/quote] I expect that if Java ever gets a multi-application virtual machine off the ground, so you don't have to run an instance of Java for every application, then they probably would push to have it on Windows as standard. And Microsoft would say "no, there's J# support on dotNet already, sod off", a

So when Vista came out and everyone was complaining about it expanding to fill the space, actually pre-caching was a great move with very real usability benefits? I must confess, I'd gone along with the received wisdom that "except maybe for Crysis or graphics editing", 4GB was more than I could possibly find a use for. I even felt I was being a touch extravagant when I bought it, although not as much as splashing out for a quad core (basically for SupCom). So, at £10 a

There's no shame in playing with electronic dolls. The Sims is a fine game. And it probably raises your creativity stat or something, just so long as you remember to check your hunger need. Looking forward to Dawn of War 2. Think they've taken it in absolutely the right direction. Also, is it just me or are the Blood Ravens the best interpretation of a Space Marine chapter ever? I am hoping for Relic to return to Homeworld at some point with a Battlefleet Gothic (Warhammer 40k space b

Well I must confess I got bogged down at book 8 and eventually stopped. So, book 1 was good enough to make me want to attempt to read the series to it's conclusion, despite the blatant Lord of the Rings parallels. I obviously don't know if the conclusion is any good or not, but the bulk of the series is pretty dire. He does keep introducing new ideas, but spreads them too thin, in some cases embarrassingly repeating himself verbatim. The characters are also thin: they level up too fast, and,

You'd really have to have more money than sense to be buying DDR3 at the moment, it's still about 3 to 4 times as expensive as DDR2 with barely any performance boost for gaming. I reckon i7 is going to be a part for the enthusiast only for at least the next 6 months.

I'd go with that. The PC is already pretty inundated with shooters, some of them very good and with well established multiplayer scenes. It'd be a tough sell, especially for Microsoft. All the Xbox hype they built up has only made PC gamers bitter and less likely to buy. And to be honest, I don't think Halo has any trump card to play. It's got a few interesting design decisions - all ripped straight from Starsiege: Tribes of course - but regenerating shields aren't going to set

It works best if you use the default font, then people can resize it in their browsers (ctrl + mouse wheel). That way all the text is the same size.

Trying to open the screenshots on the Gamespy article, I get an advertisement for Bully instead. Also: "persistent universe mode that will allow players to develop long-term open campaigns". Is that just the Metaverse, or something else? Edit: I should add that, yep, still excited, shall be pre-ordering when available.

Making it fit in 640x480 would be good for people who like to tile two windows across their monitor. That's not me - I like everything maximized - but I know a few people who do work like that. Anyway, it's a noble goal. The biggest problem for me with Impulse at the moment: exchange rates. The pound has dropped heavily against the dollar, and that means that a normal full-priced game on Impulse (or Steam) is now £10 more expensive than ordering it from Amazon. If

Trouble is, you don't know until you've opened the box if there's a good manual. Reviewers never mention it, and it's hardly something that'd be advertised. So, it's hard to make a selling point of it.

Java 7 is going to have a new concurrency setup - Fork/Join - but it's basically just a new API. Should be useful for splitting algorithms over cores in the most efficient way, but doesn't look like it adds anything for components. Actually I think we might get access to it before Java 7, and it should probably be backportable. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp11137.html <p

World of Goo was brilliant, cheap, and won't take up too much of your time ( King's Bounty has been quite fun, but is also a time hog. Colonization is very good, but too hard. It's shorter than a Civilization game, but still takes at least a long afternoon to get through a game of it.

It can be good practice generally to offload certain subsystems into their own thread. User interfaces for example, so they don't have that sticky feel to them while the program is busy. Many graphics frameworks handle it that way be default. But multithreading can be very hard. It almost always makes things more difficult to debug, and it adds a whole new class of potential errors. It really depends on your problem. The first threaded application I wrote

The Battletech Universe is interesting, but Mechwarrior dragged me in as an action game. Thankfully a quite tactical, teamwork based action game, but still rather visceral. I mostly lost to people with the big autocannons or the streak short ranged homing missiles: cheeky strategy, they'd always knock me over with splash damage by shooting the ground nearby. Still, there's definitely a joy in trying to jink and jump and twist (and lag) to stay just outside of the bigger mechs' f

I've dropped Gamespot for a different reason: too much flash on the page. There's too much noise and it's unpleasant to navigate. Since the advent of Metacritic and Gamerankings my opinion on reviewers has become more cynical. I think these sites may actually be causing some sort of new herd behaviour, because the high water mark for 90%+ reviews seems to be creeping higher and higher. And, possibly this is a genre thing, but to me a lot of those 90%+ games have be