Crusoe wrote:
I only found out about Mothership Zeta tonight! That's tomorrow night sorted out when my wife's out - wine, Fallout 3 and a burning secret sense of shame.

I'm torn, frankly. I might get The Pitt and Operation Anchorage; as presumably the newer two will be on one of the cut-price offers in the none-too-distant future.

That said, one of my mates has just got himself onto Live and I promised him a few games of Fifa later on - which will severely cut my Fallout time. The inconsiderate arsehole.

No gaming for me for the next three weeks, as my Xbox has fallen prey to the Red Ring Of Death. Though I have been reading about an interesting attempt to create a homeless family in The Sims 3.

I'm generally obsessed with football games, and if not then sports and driving games. However recently I enjoyed playing Civilization on PS3. Used to play it on the PC years ago. A have a few gripes about it but generally it's good fun.

Most of my time I'm playing FM08 - got the furthest ever, and I've been playing the series since 1993. Currently in 2034. I did get FM09, but it's far too slow for my 2 year old laptop to play with the number of leagues I like.

Quite often dabble in FM on the PSP when on holiday/train journeys. Fifa09 is my preferred football action game on PSP, but I rather ProEvo on the PS3.

Have tried to play online in both Fifa and ProEvo, but I have a few quibbles with both of their online systems. In Fifa you seem to get randomly matched up against anyone - regardless of your/their track record. As for ProEvo, I don't really understand how the points system works.

Bought the Ashes game this week - not bad. A few improvements on Brian Lara from 2005 (which I worked on), the training mode especially is good.

FM10 Demo soon. FM10 after. Oh dear.

Hopefully FM10 has as much polish as the press release suggests it has. The versions without too many changes are always much more playable than the huge overhauls!

jamzinho wrote:
Bought the Ashes game this week - not bad. A few improvements on Brian Lara from 2005 (which I worked on), the training mode especially is good.

Did you work on Brian Lara 2007? If so, can you explain why when the view flips to the outfield the animation starts crawling, even though I have a top-notch PC? It's like it stops using my graphics card or something.

So you work for Codemasters then?

I used to be a games tester at Codemasters - Nov '03 - May '06, I left just before they started working on BL07. Never really had much to do with PC testing though I'm afraid.

I played the first couple of episodes of the new Monkey Island games. Good stuff on the whole, and it's great to have new stories with those characters, but I was really struck by how weak the fundamentals were compared to my favourite recent adventure games - Ben There, Dan That, and Time, Gentlemen, Please. In those games 95% of all possible interactions have their own line of dialogue, and a stunningly high proportion of them are funny. In the new Monkey Island games (and, to be fair, this was largely true in the originals) most non-functional interactions just get a generic line and nothing at all for failed object combinations. It's pretty pathetic, really, when the tiny team at Zombie Cow can do so much better in games they're distributing for free (Ben There, Dan That) or for £3 (TGP).

Given that progress in point-and-click adventure games often degenerates into attempting every possible combination of items and environment, it makes a world of difference to your enjoyment of the game if the process of doing so is varied and fun. In Zombie Cow's games, I find myself trying out all the interactions even if I know what I'm supposed to do, just to get the dialogue.

Is it possible to play Civilization IV with Vista? I have the disk from my previous, XP, laptop, but was unable to install and run it on this one. Is there a patch or workaround or something out there?

I haven't had any problems with it on Vista or Windows 7. I expect it's a graphics card issue - it certainly used to be very fussy on that front. What graphics are you running on the new laptop?

I realise you've probably already tried this, Lodz, but you could do worse than look here

Thanks for the responses. I had a brief look at that site before, but couldn't find anything specific to solve the problem. I'll have a more careful go now for a while, looking a bit more in-depth, and see where I get to.

GY - please excuse my technical ignorance, but when you say "what graphics are you running?", is "NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS" the sort of answer you were looking for? That's the name of my graphics card, I think...

In that case Lodz, there's a link there you need to click for a patch.

Right, though another issue is that the disk makes a loud, and frankly worrying, whirring sound as soon as I put it in my disk drive, which makes me suppose something more basic is going wrong. It's doing it now, as the installation is taking place ... ah balls, I've chickened out and cancelled the installation because the noise was getting really loud and alarming. The disk appears physically OK, and I haven't had any other issues with my disk drive. Any ideas what it could be?

I wouldn't worry too much about that if it doesn't do it with other discs - it just happens with some games.

If you're really scared about it, you could always put the CD key into Steam and download the game.

None whatsoever, other than thinking the disc may be cracked around the central hole. Often happens with Xbox discs so it's a possibility....?

OK, it appears we have lift off. I checked that I had the latest device drivers installed for my graphics card, and did a Windows update, as the FAQ suggest on that link. Now it seems to work fine, and I enjoyed the opening video for the first time (my previous weedy laptop couldn't cope with the video stuff). The only funny thing is that the desktop icon didn't appear properly, but, hey ho, I can cope with that.

Now onwards and upwards! Haven't actually played it in about 3 years but really looking forward to getting back into it. FM09? FM10? Civ IV? Who needs a social life, anyway? ... Indeed, if anyone ever got round to releasing a Jeeves and Wooster RPG, I may never actually go outside ...

Good news Lodz, good news indeed.

I've decided to go out and buy the new Batman game. The demo was excellent, and it's the first time in a while I've genuinely wanted to buy a game, as opposed to swinging by Game and buying whatever was cheap / caught my eye.

Rock Band Network sounds awesome. While I love Rock Band and there's a ton of content, I've been a bit frustrated by the lack of diversity on there. And if this takes off, it could be a great way for musicians to publicise themselves relatively cheaply and make money at the same time.

Toby, I'm going to be picking up Arkham Asylum as well. The demo was extremely fun, and the reviews have been spectacular.

Lodz, now you've proved your laptop can handle Civ IV, it should probably be able to cope with Company of Heroes. Give it a shot!

Will bear it in mind, but plenty of time to get stuck back into Civ IV first...