By Pentadact

Tim calls this episode 11, because it’s the 12th, and I call it March, because it’s out in February. I’ve numbered the file 185, after the issue of PC Gamer that’s coming out this week.

In it, we discuss the Witcher, the worst games of the year, gasmasks, some new information on the Team Fortress 2 changes, pleasing pirates in Sins of a Solar Empire, and our crack legal team’s advice on how to say things we’re not allowed to say.

Editor Ross Atherton is the smooth-talking host, Deputy Editor Tim is the one with the emphatic voice, I’m the low drone, and News Editor Craig is the Scot.

Creator of the brilliant ‘Concerned’ blogging about ‘1Fort’, a possible new project. Let’s all get our hopes up so he can’t bear to let us down by aborting it.

So this is the new layout I’ve been tinkering with. There’s still some tinkering to do, but it’s very time-consuming tinkering about fancy niceties for which I have long since lost my enthusiasm. The only major thing missing is a box with links to friends’ blogs, but the way I wanted it to work relied on some highly unstable technology that I’m not going to be able to code robustly anytime soon. It involves tachyons.

I was going to talk you through why I’ve done some of the new bits, why I scrapped some of the old bits, and why it’s slimmer. But it’s kind of late, and I’m kind of burnt-out on thinking about it now. I’ll edit that stuff in later - for now, let me know what you think, and have a listen to this while you look around:

An occupational hazard: sometimes scripts have you saying things you’d rather not. Dennis Hopper’s and Liam Neeson’s are the best.

A prompt two years after it was originally published, my story about the Guiding Hand Social Club assassins is finally (legally) online. At the time a lot of bad J-PEGs of it cropped up online, and since we didn’t actually have a website of our own then, we tolerated the ones that actually bothered to note the piece came from PC Gamer. But now it’s in actual html and - in a column of that width - about as good as I can humanly make it look.

My favourite bit of it, inevitably, is the bit I didn’t write: the responses to the heist from the Intergalactic Summit. Eve players reacted to the hit with genuine disgust or admiration, but also stayed in-character. So their comments are coloured with wonderful subtexts drawn from Eve’s backstory about the slavery of the Minmatar, and subsequent rebellion.

Coupled with Eve’s extraordinarily evocative character portraits, it gives each commentator such a strong and believable personality that, reading it, I find I can imagine exactly what kind of voice each of these people would have, how they would deliver their judgements.

Look at Zhou Yu! He looks like Jesus. Of course he’s appalled. He’d talk like Neil from the Young Ones, by the way.

Look at Nanus Parkite! He’s wearing aviator shades - of course he’s unimpressed. And if you look closely at the full-size version of his portrait, you can actually see his eyes behind the lenses: they’re keen and angry, matching his Godwin-fulfilling disdain for the Guiding Hand.

Look at Zaridin! That smarmy, crisp-lipped villain. Of course he loves it, and of course he’s reserved and eloquent in his praise.

And man, look at Eddie Gordo. Can’t you just hear his thick, exotic accent? He speaks in simple, black-and-white truths, with the weight of suffering behind them. He’s the only one who doesn’t see this as a discussion of methods: he doesn’t care how it was achieved, only that the people who enslaved his race suffered.

In fact, check out Istvaan Shogaatsu, leader of the most vicious band of contract killers in the universe:

It kind of shows, right?

It’s baffling to me that a five-year-old space game still lets you create the most human and distinctive player-designed artificial faces. Why can’t we make faces like this in games where we actually have a body and face rather than a spaceship, where we can walk around and see other people’s? Instead, three years later, we get a blockbuster character-driven RPG in which the emperor of the world looks like this:

Anyway, that other site I’m working on - this one. It’s coming. It’s remarkable just how much progress you can make, and how quickly, without even coming close to finishing. I’d add that I am close to finishing now, except that I have felt close to finishing for around three weeks. It seemed nearly done half-an-hour into the process. I suddenly have a newfound sympathy for games that miss their release dates.

Chart of the correlation between ‘favourite books’ and SAT scores among college students. Interesting: Lolita is the smartest book ever. Amusing: listing “I don’t read” suggests you’re smarter than someone who lists “The Holy Bible”. Depressing: as they’re divided here, “African American” is the dumbest genre. I’m not sure I see why it (or ‘Chick Lit’) is even a genre. Surprising: Fahrenheit 451 is one of the dumbest books ever. Shameful: I’ve only read one book listed here. But: it is the fourth smartest.

Because testing this stuff offline is an enormous hassle, and WordPress has masses of functions that are only valid when used in this: the main index file; James will be down, malfunctioning, hideous or utterly screwed up for many many hours tonight. If it’s not fixed by the time I get bored of fixing it, I’ll revert to this design and give up. Either way, it’ll be a working website again on Sunday.

I’ve been lobbying Robin Walker with increasingly bizarre suggestions for sprucing up the Medic, and he’s had some annoyingly good reasons why they wouldn’t work. Can’t wait to see what will.

Cooking is somehow so much more exciting when you treat it as science. PS. Testing a new way of doing links, with this.

This just went live, and makes me happy in several ways.

• Added an option in the Options->Multiplayer dialog to filter custom game files being downloaded from servers

Ahhhh.

• Fixed cases where ragdolls were falling through the world

Ahhhh!

• Graphics optimizations for mid and low end hardware

Ooh.

• Fixed players blocking doors in Well

Heh.

• Fixed engineer building in exploit areas on final caps in Well

Oh?

• Increased starting round timer to 10 minutes in Well

Hmm.

But my favourite Steam Update News - and I apologise if you’d hoped I might do something like a ‘Films of the Year’ post instead of this - was actually a little while ago.

• Added effects to players when they earn an achievement, visible to other players nearby

Cool. But isn’t there an achievement for tricking an enemy Medic into healing you while you’re disguised? Would this not give the game away somewhat?

A few days later:

• Fixed cloaked/disguised/disguising spy reporting his achievements to everyone else

Reason Valve should hire me #26: totally saw that one coming.