Recent content by Susurrus

The pirate ship in the first picture seems to me heavily based on Sir Francis Drake's ship, the Golden Hinde (or at least the re-construction of it) - this probably explains both Cerebus the Aardvark and the red hatching round the side...

I disagree. Bioware's romances since at least Mass Effect 1 were always designed to garner publicity. They used the "we're being inclusive" badge to promote their games to people with orientations which had to date been overlooked in videogames, and to gain a lot of free publicity from every...

Can I ask how you found the balance of real-time battles to campaign map? I've felt that an increasing problem with the Total War series is just how many battles you have to fight to actually achieve anything. Shogun 2 (or actually maybe Empire) started this trend by giving "Rebel" factions...

I have to disagree. The Dispersion Pistol in Unreal 1 gets 4 upgrades, hidden throughout the game, at the end of which it becomes very powerful. Particularly as the damage amplifier in that game only applied to energy weapons, and that is an energy weapon. I believe I am right in saying that I...

Had exactly the same problem with a Razer Copperhead - the pads under the mouse buttons wore away, and even after I sorted this issue, it died two months later. The solution is this mouse...

Yeah, pretty much. If ever there was a half-baked attempt to prolong an excellent series well past its sell-by-date, this was it. And until that point, it really was one of the best shows I have ever watched.

The ending of Chuck is very bittersweet, for what is almost universally a very upbeat show. On the other hand, I think that actually gives it more weight than a "happily ever after" ending would have done. And additionally, I think that it really was a satisfying plot resolution at the same...

Unreal. Towards the end, you are progressing through an alien spaceship. At one point, you enter the detention area. There are huge numbers of very tough Skaarj units (and some pupae) locked behind force cages. They cannot get out and completely ignore you. Eventually, you progress to a...

Hang on, hang on. American McGee makes it sound like EA made a horrible horrible trailer that had nothing to do with the game. Now, the tone might have been inconsistent with much of the game, but EA basically just used a cutscene that is in the game. It's difficult to see how using an...

That's fine, but in this case, the black/white fades still don't make sense. Some are black, and some are white - if he died in the prologue, all should be white. Alternatively, only his memories should be fade to black - but why on earth is there a fade to white on the 2nd level, when he...

I think this is utter rubbish. I read the interview with the writer who said that fades to white were hallucinations - but RIGHT AT THE BEGINNING, around the plane level, the game fades to white. What hallucination is taking place there, exactly? It does not make sense. And if that was a...

Accepting all of that, surely that doesn't change the fact that they are more culpable than him? He's actually mad at this point, to the point of having hallucinations. Even if you can't blame them much, they are more to blame than Walker himself.

Didn't shoot the escaping soldier, tried to save Gould, shot the snipers, fired into the air, went home. Does anyone else feel that the ending cinematic (with Konrad) kind of questions Walker's culpability? I mean, it's made pretty clear that both Lugo and the other guy are both aware that...

Seems a bit unfair to be down on the film - the opening 60-odd pages of the book are utter tripe, too. It's only once the shipwreck happens that anything is interesting. And the ending, with the darker story, is given almost off-hand when the policeman interviewing him asks what happened to the...

It's a shame, really, because the first few Medal of Honour games were absolutely great. Pacific Assault is, for me, the pinnacle of WW2 shooters, and that was a Medal of Honour game. But given that the last two MoH games have been appalling (whatever the last one was called, and then that...