I've threatened on many occasions to make some MP3s available on this site of the worst band in the South West, the infamous Shirley Temple Pilots. Up till this point, common sense has prevailed and I've forgotten to carry out my promise.

Well, common sense has gone out of the window for the moment - so ladies and gentlemen, I give you a track recorded at Finns in Weymouth on the 8th January 2005.

Fuel

Usual caveats apply; I'd had too much to drink, voice playing up, a car drove by outside that was exactly the wrong shade of puce... you get the picture.

 

I'm really grateful to id for releasing Doom3 back in September. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of near pant soiling terror, the shocks when turning on my flashlight in a darkened area to see a zombie poised to rip out my throat, the awesome special effects like the heat haze around the imps' fireballs and the creepy 'System Shock 2'-esque PDA plot device.

An excellent game that I still highly recommend.

But, if Valve had released Half-Life 2 before id had got its magnum opus out of the door, I doubt I would ever have played it. Once again, the bar has been raised when it comes to first player action; in fact, not so much raised as moved wholesale by several miles.

I got home from work last night, started Steam which promptly started to unlock the preloaded copy on my hard drive. Off to the kitchen to make hot steaming cup of caffeine, and when I came back the game was ready to play - no hassles, no dramas. I know some people have had problems, but for me the experience was seamless.

And then on to the game; first things first - the videos that we have all been drooling over for what seems like forever (insert obligatory DNF joke here) do not do the game justice. The game feels smooth, the action is fluid and the facial animation is something else. OK, I don't have the most sluggish rig in the world, but it's certainly not the best (FWIW; Asus P4P800-SE Deluxe; P4 HT 3.0GHz; 1Gb 2700 RAM; MSI FX 5700 Ultra; 160Gb DiamondPlus 9 SATA); by contrast, Doom 3 struggled to get a decent framerate at 1024x768 on this machine whereas Half-Life 2 simply seems to take things in its stride.

So far, I've only played for a couple of hours (I'm still on the wonderfully named 'Route Kanal' level), but already I've come across a couple of wonderful touches; in particular, Barney's jibe that a degree from MIT must have come in really useful for throwing a switch is priceless.

My other favourite touch at the moment has to be feeding exploding barrels to the barnacles, and then exploding them.

I cannot recommend this game highly enough. The temptation to throw a sickie was very strong - but as I work in an IT environment, I suspect I would have been rumbled! Go buy, go play. End of story.

Apparently I'm a .DLL....

Which File Extension are You?

Bored of the Windows XP Fisher Price Luna theme? Thanks to someone who commented on Don Box's blog here, you can install the Windows Media Center 2005 'Royale' theme on your XP system. The great thing with this theme is that is doesn't require mucking around with StyleXP to get it to work.

Download the Energy Blue Theme Pack and extract the files (if you've got WinZip installed, you can right click the file and extract). You need to copy four of the files to:

%WINDIR%\Resources\Themes\royale.theme
%WINDIR%\Resources\Themes\Royale\royale.msstyles
%WINDIR%\Resources\Themes\Royale\Shell\shellstyle.dll
%WINDIR%\Resources\Themes\Royale\Wallpaper\energybliss.jpg

You should now find the Royale theme available in the Display control panel applet.

 

Counter Strike is a phenomenon that has largely passed me by; although I've owned a copy for a while via a Half-Life bundle I bought a while ago, and of course through Steam, it's not something I've ever really got into. Maybe it's because of having an ever increasing family and the attendant lack of time required to play the game and learn the maps, or maybe it was the attitude of the l33t 13 year olds playing the game towards n00bs (like myself) that put me off. Anyway, I decided to buy the Half-Life 2 Silver package via Steam the other day (I already had Half-Life 2 on order via Amazon, but I've decided against the additional wait of hanging around for the postman after the game has officially been released). Intrigued as to how the Source engine would perform on my setup, I decided to fire up Counter Strike: Source. Well, blow me down if it's not a cracking game. The graphics are gorgeous, and the gameplay definitely has that 'just one more go...' feel to it. Oh well, better go; I've got years of terrorist related gameplay to catch up on before Half Life 2 is activated....