First things first, a couple of quick corrections and clarifications. I'm trying to give a balanced and accurate view of the game in these posts and while I stand by 99% of what I've written, there are two corrections needed:

First of all, the long "mini" installs I complained about on the first day were, it seems, as a result of congestion on Polyphony's servers. I didn't realise that the game accessed the net constantly (if a connection is available) during singleplayer play. With the congestion now somewhat relieved, the loading delays navigating the menus are much reduced and the mini-installs tend to be over in 10-15 seconds. Of course, how comfortable you are with a game that accesses the net constantly while you play singleplayer may vary.

Second, I found other ways of making cash in-game (which I'll cover in a moment) which reduce the amount of time you will have to spend grinding the same few events for cash. Note, however, that I say "reduce", not "remove"; you'll still have to repeat events from time to time, which doesn't tend to be the case in other games these days.

With that out of the way, I thought I'd cover GT5's event mode. Event mode in GT4 was pretty poor, really; a sequence of fixed-car races which demanded a level of cornering perfection that was mostly impossible on a Dualshock 2. GT5's event mode has been expanded upon significantly, with quite a few unique-vehicle races and even a few cutscenes locked away here. I spent a few hours in event mode last night and had experiences which, while mixed, did include some positives.

I'll start with the positives; the kart racing is fun. Kart racing is the first of the event mode races to be unlocked (they all have level restrictions) and, based on the ones I've seen so far, certainly the best. Yes, the same problems that plague the proper races, such as braindead AI and a horrible implementation of slipstreaming, are still there, but the nature of the kart races tends to shift the emphasis away from them. The karts are nimble and slightly tricky to control, which pans out very well; you need a lot of finesse to manage both the steering and the acceleration and braking. Happily, the degree of finesse required is not beyond what's possible on a Dualshock 3, so overall. Better still, the collision physics, which feel vastly inappropriate in the rest of the game, actually feel just fine for kart racing.

Some of the other events are rather less impressive. I found the NASCAR one deeply dull, though at least the slipstream stuff feels vaguely appropriate in the context of NASCAR. A race in camper vans around the Top Gear Test Track is a good pun but a bad event, and demonstrates the irritating uber-perfectionism of GT4's events. The Nurburgring events are ok, though timed point to point runs are hardly anything new (Forza 3 did them too). The rally events lie further into the event mode, but I've not yet gotten around to trying them out.

One curious fact about event mode is that it is absurdly generous with its cash rewards. Getting a gold in a single event, some of which last only a few seconds, can give more cash than an entire comparable-level 3-race event out in A-Spec mode. Interestingly, while completed events can be played again, they only give out each level of cash reward (gold, silver, bronze) once. They don't want you farming these for cash.

Back in A-Spec mode, I spent some time with the "classic" car events. These form three out of the nine beginner level events, so they're prominent right from the start of the game. For the most part, they're not too bad. The classic cars handle convincingly enough, though all of the flaws of the other races are still present. One irritating fact I did find with these heavily restricted-entry races is that there tends to be one or two cars on the AI roster for each whose performance is completely out of line with the rest. For example, in the Japanese classics series, you may find yourself facing a 1978 Dome Zero; this beast is going to be completely unbeatable unless you have either a fortune to spend boosting the power of one of the other cars, or get lucky enough to snag one for yourself (and I've not seen one on sale). I ended up quitting and reloading one race several times until the game's random number generator decided not to put that car on the grid. The game is in desperate need of a Forza-style "Performance Index", which can be used to keep events reasonably balanced (not least by preventing the player from "cheesing" them with an overpowered car).

I also spent some time with the car tuning menu last night (as opposed to the upgrade menu). This is, irritatingly, tucked away on the garage menu, rather than on the tuning shop menu or the race menu, meaning a lot of clicking through menus if you need to change a car's setup between races). This became necessary for me when I hit a race around the Cirque de la Sarthe, which the default gear ratios for my car was rendering unwinnable. Aside from tweaking gear ratios, I was slightly disappointed by how limited the tuning options were; there wasn't that much else I could do. Maybe more will unlock later.

When I posted my first thoughts on Gran Turismo 5 yesterday, I covered quite a number of topics, but only touched relatively briefly upon perhaps the most important of all; the racing. This was largely a result of the lack of time I'd had with the game. Of the 90 or so minutes of post-install gameplay that I had with the game, 45 or so were with the car shops, the tuning shop and the licence tests. As a result, I only saw a small number of races. Now that I've spent a few more hours racing, I thought I'd add a bit more commentary on the most important part of the GT5 package.

GT5'a A-Spec racing mode will be instantly familiar to anybody who's played a previous GT game. Races are grouped into events, either as packages of single races or as tournaments, which, once started, must be played through to completion or aborted in their entirety. Events have different entry requirements and restrictions, though one new (and entirely unwelcome) addition is that of a new "level" requirement to participate in an event, alongside the more traditional (and still unwelcome) licence requirements.

The opening events are fairly undemanding; the initial Sunday Cup consists of three short single-races of two or three laps each around the game's shortest circuits, against opponents in basic, entry-level cars. Be warned, however, that many of the other beginner-level events are quite prescriptive, with very few of the "generalist" races found in Forza 3. If your first car doesn't meet the entry requirements of more than one event, you can expect to have to repeat the early events a good few times to build up the cash for a second purchase. This kind of repetitive grind of the same events had been eliminated in its entirety from Forza 3 and it feels antiquated here.

With a relatively small number of events compared to Forza 3, the challenge level of events, or at least the level of car you will require, seems to increase relatively quickly. My AE86 Levin was perfect for the Sunday Cup and, with a bit of tuning, managed to beat the Compact Car event without too much trouble, but to stand a chance in the beginner-level FR cup, I needed to save up for something a bit meatier; I eventually went for an RX-7 FC.

The format of the races is again familiar. The player's car is placed around the middle of a (pleasingly large) starting grid. The number of participants in events varies, but some have as many as 16 cars on the track at the same time. I haven't yet found an option to run a qualifying lap to improve my starting position, but that doesn't mean it isn't in there; GT5 does not make all of its features easy to find.

In terms of the cars' handling, there is both good and bad news. I'll start with the good news; and it is very good news indeed. The overall quality of the handling model is decisively improved not just since GT4, but also since GT5 Prologue and GT Portable. The GT series has previously been known for a rather heavy handling model, with understeer showing up in all kinds of unexpected (and inaccurate) places. Even with the driver assists turned off, racing in the older GT games could feel like driving with an exceptionally heavy-handed traction control mechanism switched on. This is a thing of the past. A lightweight FR or MR will now feel like the skitish beast that it should. If you want to try your hand at a drift racing style, you'll be pretty pleased; GT5's drifting is easy to get started on, but difficult to master. This is exactly as it should be.

Some of the GT5 reviews have enthused about the quality of the modelling of braking in the game. I must say that I've yet to be particularly impressed by this. However, it is entirely plausible that I'm being hampered by the rather crap nature of the Dualshock 3's analogue shoulder buttons, which are nothing like as precise as the Xbox 360's counterparts. I'll test the braking using pedals at the weekend and see if things improve.

Sadly, there's a lot more bad news about the handling and physics, and some of this bad news is extremely serious. Crash modelling is absolutely appalling. Cars bounce off each other in a massively unconvincing way. Occasionally, when two cars collide, the physics will glitch and both cars will drive along locked together, frequently with one of the cars pointing out at an odd angle. Then they separate and continue as before, perfectly unscathed. There is a single collision sound, which is a bit like the sound you get if you throw a baseball hard into a wet sack of sand. This plays for every collision, no matter how severe, and will play on a loop when two cars get locked together.

Another problem relates to slipstreaming. Now, slipstreams are a real and valid part of racing and it is absolutely right and proper that a racing game models them. GT5 is into this in a big way, with the first tier of licence tests making a big deal of slipstreaming. Unfortunately, the implementation is hideous. Slipstreaming can allow a car to gain on an equally-powered competitor directly ahead of it, or can allow a less powerful car to keep pace with a slightly faster opponent. Slipstreaming is NOT a massive nuclear-powered vacuum cleaner strapped to the back of a car which sucks in everything behind the car with the force of a small black hole. Except in GT5, that's exactly how it feels. I've managed to find some replicatable situations where GT5's implementation of the slipstream effect accelerates a substantially slower car to speeds far in excess of what the maximum that the opponent it is chasing is capable of. It feels a lot like that most hated and despised of racing game features; rubberbanding.

The problems caused by the broken slipstream modelling are amplified by the dismal AI.

The AI opponents in GT5 have no awareness of the player.

Read that line above again. I am not exaggerating. I am not trying to make some comic point. That line is a simple statement of fact. The opponent cars in GT5 are not aware of the player and will not take any action at all based on the player's actions. They won't dodge, they won't pull out to overtake, they won't try to block, they won't do anything except stick to their pre-defined line and return to it if you nudge them out of it.

This gives rise to a hilariously awful situation which I have encountered several times in just a few hours play. The player comes out of a corner with a faster exit than the car behind him. The player's car is faster on the straights than the car behind him. But WHOOPS, there goes the nuke-o-vac-9000 on the rear of the player's car and now the car behind is hurtling towards him with a 20 mph speed advantage. The player has to decide. He can move aside and let himself be passed, or he can hold his ground and hope to make it to the next corner, where the nuke-o-vac-9000 gets turned off again. Opting for the latter, the player holds on for dear life. Sadly, it's to no avail; there's a muffled, wet thumping noise as the car behind ploughs straight into him. His car now locks at a 30 degree angle to the road, but continues moving in its original direction, as the car behind locks together with his. Both cars roll serenely forward, with the player now completely out of control, as his speed ticks down and the rest of the field passes him.

Of course, you can use the rubbish elements of the physics engine to your advantage as well. When overtaking, it helps to think of the other car not as an opponent, but rather as a kind of mobile steering-aid for your own car. You can just bounce off the inside of them on the next corner and sail on past (but watch out for the nuke-o-vac-9000 on the next straight).

So overall, the racing experience in GT5 is profoundly unsatisfactory. Forza 3 is a racing sim. If you want to do well in Forza 3, you will need to learn how to race. GT5's Signature Edition comes with a large book that teaches you how to race, but the game itself is more akin to a rather buggy Mario Kart than to an actual racing sim.

I got home with my Signature Edition of Gran Turismo 5 last night. Sadly, as I ended up stuck at work later than usual, I didn't get as much time with it as I would have liked. However, I still had time to do the install and setup and then get in an hour and a half or so with the game (at the expense of being a bit bleary-eyed this morning).

I'll start with a note about the Signature Edition. This is probably the most impressive packaging I've ever seen for a game, which is probably to be expected given the price-tag. You get a substantial, well-built metal case, which has more than adequate padding inside to protect the contents. Inside, you get your copy of the game (of course) in the regular PS3-game box, two voucher-codes to redeem the special edition cars in the Playstation Store, a short, glossy coffee-table book with screenshots from the game, a larger (but less glossy) book with a fairly comprehensive guide to race-driving, a metal keychain fob, a 4 gig USB memory stick which comes pre-loaded with a "behind the scenes" video and a servicable wallet. Inside the wallet is a code that allows for entry into the "win a real car" competition, though these codes don't seem to be working yet. Obviously, whether this package is worth the substantial price-tag for you will depend on how attached you are to the Gran Turismo series; despite the generally high standards of the package, it's hard to see it as anything but an extravagant purchase.

Once you stop admiring the package, GT5 makes one of the more frustrating aspects of PS3 gaming immediately apparent; the days of just sticking the disc in the drive and playing are long gone on Sony's system. GT5 is by no means setting a precedent here, but it is certainly one of the most striking exemplars. The first step is to load the bonus edition cars from the Playstation store. This isn't too painful and only takes a minute or two and it can be sped up hugely by plugging a USB keyboard into the PS3. On inserting the disc into the drive, it downloads a 130 meg update. I'd heard about this in advance and was worried that Sony's/Polyphony's servers would collapse on launch day. Happily, I was wrong, with the update downloading at my connection's maximum rate of circa 620k/sec.

With the update installed, the game then offers you the choice of a hard disk installation, along with a strong recommendation that you allow this. The install process is long. Seriously long. At 42 minutes on my first-generation 60 gig US PS3, GT5's install process takes longer than many Windows installations I've done in the past (in terms of going from formatting the PC's hard disk to having Windows installed and pointed at Windows Update). You'd hope that allowing this mammoth installation would result in a smooth experience once the game is loaded; unfortunately, this is not to be.

You see, the install doesn't actually install all of the required content. This will continue to install itself in further chunks as you play the game. There seems to be very little logic to when these mini-installs take place. Going into some menus would trigger an install, while other menus wouldn't. There was no install when I first accessed the used car store, but exiting it triggered an install sequence. The mini-installs average about 3 minutes in duration, with one install going over 5 minutes. I'm hoping that these will become less common as I spend more time with the game, but they are proving fairly agonising so far. Why the game could not just install all of its data during the initial install process is a mystery to me. However; don't think you can get away without the install. While it is theoretically possible to play the game with only a few megabytes of footprint allowed on the PS3's hard disk, there are reports online of this resulting in truly horrendous loading times; worse even than Forza 3's (which are painful enough already).

As for the game itself... I must confess that I find it difficult to describe my early experiences as anything other than a brutal, crushing disappointment. As is traditional for Gran Turismo games, the game takes great delight in locking most of its content away behind a series of fairly arbitrary gates. The much-reviled licence tests make a distinctly unwelcome return. They're now tied to a level-up system that further restricts your access to cars and events (a la Forza 2, before Turn 10 realised that the system sucked and ditched the restrictive aspects for Forza 3).

Your first task will be to purchase a starter car, with the 20,000 credits that the game starts you with. I've always enjoyed this aspect of the GT and Forza games; starting out with a low end car, tuning it to its limits and then moving onto fancier and faster cars. Be warned, however, that if you have downloaded any of the special edition or pre-order cars, then these will go straight into your garage. I'd assumed that, as with Forza 3, they'd be added to the game's car-shop for purchase with in-game credits, but this is not the case. Some of the fastest cars in the game will be deposited straight in your garage. The same presumably also applies to any cars that were in your Gran Turismo Portable garage. Fortunately, I have enough willpower to avoid making use of them at this stage, and instead head to the used car store.

A word of explanation here; only around 1/4 of GT5's cars have had the "full" development cycle (meaning detailed artwork, damage modelling and interiors). These cars are sold through the "new car" show-rooms and you probably won't be able to afford any with the starter-cash. The game's remaining cars are sold through the used car dealership, with only a random selection of 30 or so of the game's 750ish non-premium cars available here at any given time.

After seeing the jaw-dropping screenshots and videos that have been doing the rounds online for quite some time now, it is a real punch to the gut to see how primative the models are for the non-premium cars. They are basically unchanged from GT5, released in 2005 back on the PS2. GT5's non-premium cars look substantially worse than the Forza 3 versions of said cars, where direct equivalents exist. There are also markedly fewer visual customisation options; the game basically limits you to changing the colour of the car and its wheels. It's not all negative, though. Each car is accompanied by a substantial piece of text describing the car and its history. This is a nice touch which I've not seen replicated elsewhere.

So, after enduring the first sequence of licence tests, it's time to start a race. It should be noted that loading times for the races themselves are pretty good; certainly faster than Forza 3's, once you've done the install. The loading delays seem to be entirely confined to the game's menus. The thing that struck me on starting my first race (a 3 lap run around a short section of the Autumn Ring course in a Toyota AE86) is just how little has changed visually since GT4. The starting grid is packed with non-premium cars with their low detail models and the circuit itself seems to have been given only the most rudimentary of visual updates since GT4. If you've ever played an old game using a modern tool that allows for higher resolutions (for example, running a PS1 game in an emulator that allows for high resolutions), you'll be aware that upscaling the resolution on such old content results in a rather stretched, sparse look. This is exactly how many of the "old" tracks in GT4 look. I need to add here that the premium cars and many of the new tracks look much, much better; certainly, they're at the top end of what we've seen the PS3 do in terms of graphics. But starting out in your career, you are going to be looking at some seriously ugly graphics.

The gameplay feels similarly dated. I noted with some amusement that the game defaulted to using the Dualshock 3's face buttons for acceleration and braking. Erm... no. While I'm fully aware the buttons are pressure sensitive, the idea of actually using them for an analogue control axis is not acceptable. A quick bit of button reassignment later and acceleration and braking are safely on the R2 and L2 buttons where they belong. This isn't significant in itself, but it's indicative of how GT5's gameplay has failed to keep up with the times. One of the biggest disappointments for me was the absence of any noticable improvements to the notoriously poor Gran Turismo AI. Opponent cars still bumble around the track happily ignoring the player. I'm told things get slightly better at the higher levels, but I remain skeptical. I can well understand why the game may have weaker opponents in the early events, but this just felt like bad AI, rather than good AI driving badly.

Collisions remain laughably poor. Even with damage modelling in the game, collisions feel (and sound) like something from a dodgems rink. Cars get bounced out of their racing line and then bounce back into it unperturbed. The car handling is good, but not spectacular. In many ways it feels like GT4's. It's really not helped by the poor sound quality, which, like GT4, uses a single generic "wheel screech" sound. You can forget about making any serious use of sound to figure out the limits of your tyres' grip.

After a couple of races in the AE86, I decide to try out one of the premium cars. As I've had no problems winning the first two races in the starter car, I decide that it's morally justifiable for me to jump into one of the premium cars for the third race in the series. Things are slightly better here. The sound quality is slightly higher (though still poor compared to Forza 3) and the in-car view is undeniably impressive (though I suspect I will still end up racing with the bonnet-camera).

There's still a lot of the game I haven't seen yet. I haven't seen the high-end races yet. I haven't touched the multiplayer. I haven't been anywhere near the karts or the ralllying yet. However, first impressions are not good. I don't have much I need to do this weekend and I'm off work on Monday, so I should be able to spend some proper time with the game over the next few days. Hopefully things will improve. But there's relatively little cause for optimism so far.

Gran Turismo 5 will finally be released less than 24 hours from now, after many years in development. We've already seen the game's graphical prowess and I suspect that this, along with the sheer scale of the game (which will make the review process tricky) will ensure that early reviews are filled with burbling praise.

Now, I'm greatly looking forward to the release of GT5 and will be picking up my pre-order on the way into work tomorrow, but I'm by no means prepared to lavish praise upon it in areas where it may not be merited. Indeed, the sheer length of the game's development time, as well as the deeply poor GT5: Prologue have me in a suspicious frame of mind and there will be a number of things I will be looking out for.

The areas where I'll be focussing my attention are:

1) The racing experience: this is an absolutely fundamental aspect of the game and I've been worried that there's been a near total absence of coverage of this. The game can have stunning graphics and as many cars as it wants, but if the actual racing isn't up to scratch, then most players will ultimately end up underwhelmed.

GT5: Prologue was significantly behind the competition in this area in a number of respects (as was Gran Turismo on the PSP). The most important areas were damage modelling, artificial intelligence, difficulty scaling and event design. In every single one of these areas, Forza Motorsport 3 performs significantly better than GT5: Prologue.

Now, of course, GT5: Prologue was released quite some time ago and we can expect the game to have moved on since then. We know that damage modelling is in GT5, which is an extremely good thing. Proper damage modelling encourages proper racing, in both singleplayer and multiplayer, as opposed to the game of high-speed dodgems that previous GT games have tended to become. So in this specific area, it's clear that the racing experience has been improved.

I've not seen or heard anything about AI, though, and this does worry me. The opponent AI in GT5: Prologue and GT:PSP is woeful compared to that in many competitors. Opponents in Forza 3 and Grid actually race against the player. They will block the player, put pressure on him when chasing him, and even, on occasion, make serious mistakes that send them spinning off the track. Throughout the entire history of the GT series, AI opponents have never done anything other than drive around a pre-determined racing line, largely ignoring the player (until they crash into him). The first thing I'll want to see from GT5 is a more convincing sense that my AI controlled opponents are actually racing against me.

Difficulty scaling has become more advanced in a number of ways over the years. The biggest (and best) innovation has been the "rewind" button, which allows players to zap back in time to before they made a major mistake. This was pioneered by Grid, but has shown up in the Dirt series, as well as in Forza 3. In a genre that tends to eschew quicksaves, the rewind feature has been a huge frustration reliever, particularly once players get into races which can last 30 minutes or longer. I will be expecting to see one of these in GT5 and will be seriously unhappy if it isn't there.

I'd also like to see more thought put into the toggleable driver assists. One of the great things about Forza 3 was that you could toggle any number of assists on and off. While this has some singleplayer value, its main use was in balancing multiplayer matchups, allowing for players of wildly different skill and experience levels to have competitive matches in head to head multiplayer. When you have a bunch of friends or family gathered around a console, this is a huge bonus. In fairness, previous GT games have not been bad in this respect, but there is certainly more that could be done in GT5.

Event design is a tricky one. Of course, one of the great joys of the whole GT5/Forza genre of racing sims lies in collecting new cars and tuning them to optimise their performance. However, it has been relatively easy in previous GT games to tune a car to the point where it becomes effectively unbeatable in many of the events. The Performance Index system pioneered by Forza went a long way towards countering this and it would be nice to see GT5 also putting some thought into this area (even if it doesn't come to the same solution).

2) The game's sound. First things first, some major kudos to GT5 for becoming the first major PS3 title to allow for custom soundtracks. This has been common in Xbox and 360 games for years, but I've never come across it before on a Sony platform. Custom soundtracks are a huge bonus in a game like this.

But I was very disappointed by the sound quality in GT5: Prologue. While engine sounds were fine, the game still seemed to be using a single "tyre screech" sound, which sounds frankly inappropriate in many of the cars in the game. Sound is a vital part of a high end racing game and listening to your tyres can be a vital tool for working out just how card you can push a car in a corner. This is an area that I hope has had a lot more attention since GT5: Prologue.

3) Career mode: The Gran Turismo series essentially pioneered its particular variety of career mode and it is a model that many competitors such as Forza have imitated over the years. However, pioneering though it was, the old GT4 career mode is looking a bit dated now.

It's interesting that none of GT's competitors have ever seen fit to mimic the licence tests. There's a good reason for this; while the licence tests may have value as an optional extra, as a core part of the career mode, they have never been anything but tedium and frustration. Requiring licences to enter events should be consigned to the dustbin of history.

I'd also like to see GT5 moving towards the Forza 3 model of not locking cars away behind arbitrary requirements, but having them all purchasable (and usable in arcade mode) from the moment the player first loads up the game. Not only does this allow the player more leeway to develop his garage, but it's a welcome feature for multiplayer sessions.

Anyway, those are a few of the things that I'm hoping to see in GT5. These mostly reflect advances that have been made elsewhere within the genre. If Polyphony have any sense, they will have been looking at their competitors and taking notes. If they haven't... their game will have suffered as a result.

I've played a lot more New Vegas since my last journal entry on the subject and, as I have quite a bit more to say now, not least in terms of revisions to my earlier comments, I thought I'd do an update.

I finished my first playthrough in around 36 hours. This was not a completionist playthrough; in fact, the faction-based nature of New Vegas's storyline makes it impossible to do one of those on a single playthrough. But after about 34 hours, I'd hit the level cap and I'd explored around 2/3rds of the locations on my world map. I felt that it was time for my first character's journey to end, so I went and did the final mission sequence. I'll revisit the game at some point in the not too distant future, with a different character, but I can't imagine that this will lead to any fundamental changes in my views on the game.

I'll start by discussing the bugs, since I've mentioned these elsewhere in slashdot discussions. At the time I wrote my "first thoughts" journal entry on New Vegas, I had not hit any serious bugs, other than a few enemies that sunk half way into the ground. However, at the time I wrote that entry, I'd only just reached the city of New Vegas itself. Sadly, moving around that city is not, at present, a smooth experience. Several areas seem prone to causing a crash to desktop, while others have more extreme versions of the performance issues found elsewhere in the game. I also suffered some quest glitches as I got further into the game, most of which only cost me a few seconds, as I reverting to a quicksave fixed them. Another, however, required me to go back to a "proper" save that was about 45 minutes old. This isn't to say that New Vegas is unplayable, but it is to say that playing it in its current state will require frequent quicksaves, as well as proper use of the "normal" save slots. This is of particular importance in the city of New Vegas itself.

Bugs aside, my first playthrough was extremely impressive. There is a huge amount of exploration possible within the game, and to be honest, that wasn't even starting to get old after 35 hours. There's a better variety of locations to explore than in Fallout 3 as well; almost every building has some kind of story to it. The second half of my playthrough introduced some more substantial quests as well. For the most part, these were great. It's interesting to spend a while working with one faction, then see how that has influenced the reaction of other factions to you. There's also good variety in the quests, ranging from bug-hunts to diplomatic missions to underwater salvage operations. That said, a few of the quest-lines did seem to involve rather too much fast-travelling between two NPCs in different parts of the world, so that they could hold a conversation by proxy. This was particularly frustrating with some of the quest lines in New Vegas itself, as you can only fast-travel to the outer perimeter of the city, often leaving a substantial walk and several loading screens at the other end. The Brotherhood of Steel bunker was similarly frustrating and my heart sank whenever I had to go there.

Combat gets a lot more fun as you get further into the game. As with Fallout 3, battles can feel frustrating and imprecise early on, when you only have low weapon skills. Later in the game, I found that the exact same weapons I'd been using in the first few hours had transformed from virtual feather-dusters into lethal killing machines. The new weapon categorisations make much more sense than Fallout 3's. Not having all of the heavy weapons lumped together under a single skill is a great incentive to actually use them. With the flamethrower now ranked as an energy weapon, I was able to use it far more extensively than I ever did in Fallout 3. Moreover, as your character's skills increase, you'll find yourself less reliant upon VATS in combat. Indeed, there were plenty of times, particularly when sniping, that I found myself being far more effective with manual aiming than with VATS.

This is supported by a few other balance changes since Fallout 3. The older game had an initial level cap of 20, which was later raised to 30 via DLC. New Vegas starts with a level cap of 30, but balances things very differently. The level 21-30 perks in Fallout 3 were unbelievably good and could transform a character into an unstoppable killing machine, albeit one who was utterly dependant upon VATS. New Vegas only lets you take a perk every 2 levels (though skills increase every level) and the high level perks are far more restrained than those in Fallout 3. Perks that boost VATS usage, in particular, have had a strong whack from the nerf-bat.

In my first thoughts post, I criticised the game's implementation of companions. On reflection, this was unfair. If you spend some time setting up your companions' behaviour via the companion wheel, then they become far more useful. Of course, some of the companions are more useful than others and it didn't help that the first one I came across was one of the worst. It's certainly worth keeping two companions with you in New Vegas, not least because of the quests they can initiate. One of my favorite side-quests - and one that related to the final battle - was given by one of my companions. I particularly like the fact that you can now send unwanted companions to your player-housing, where they will wait for your return. Checking their inventory is still a royal pain in the backside, unfortunately.

Various other aspects of New Vegas don't reveal themselves properly until later in the game. The new crafting system, while available right from the start, probably won't be useful to most players until they're 20 or so hours into the game, due to the scarcity of parts in the early sections. Weapons modification, likewise, is a fun addition to the game but one which probably won't come onto its own until you are quite a long way through the game.

Finally, the overall storyline does pick up somewhat. I chose to follow the NCR-ending on my first playthrough and there is some reasonable tension in the concluding sections of that storyline. However, I stand by my original assessment that New Vegas lacks a touch of Fallout 3's storytelling power.

Since the unveiling of Gran Turismo 5's car list at the end of last week, I've been a bit unkind about the overall variety of cars on the list. I've since decided to go look at the evidence, and do a proper comparison of GT5's car list with that of its main competitor, Forza Motorsport 3. For reference, GT5 boasts a car list of over 1,000 cars, while Forza 3's Ultimate Edition (or the original game in its fully DLCed-up incarnation) is in the region of 500. However, the sheer length of the list is largely meaningless, if the list is mostly variants upon a small number of themes.

What I've therefore done is look at this on a manufacturer basis, looking which manufacturers are in one game but not the other. This is complicated a little by the fact that GT games tend to include large numbers of tuning shops, which do not produce their own cars but rather modify other people's. Forza 3 compensates for this through its tuning options, painting facility and marketplace, which allow for extensive performance tuning and visual modification of cars. For this reason, I've marked tuning shops on the lists with a *. I've also acknowledged that we have an out-of-box GT5 here competing with an Ultimate Edition of Forza 3. While I think that GT5's epic development time makes the inclusion of Forza's extra cars fair game, I have, for accuracy's sake, marked Forza's DLC/Ultimate only manufacturers with an &. I've ignored the Polyphony Digital original designs on the basis that, well, they're not real cars.

Manufactuers in Gran Turismo 5, but not in Forza 3:

AC Cars*
AEM*
Alpine
Amuse*
Art Morrison*
Autobacs*
Blitz*
Caterham
Callaway
Cizeta
Daihatsu
DMC
Dome
Eagle
Gillet
Ginetta
HKS*
Hommell
HPA*
Isuzu
Jay Leno
Jensen
Lister
Marcos
Mercury
MG
Mine's*
Mugen*
NISMO*
Opera*
Oullim
Pescarolo*
Plymouth
RE Amemiya*
RUF* (see note)
Spoon*
Suzuki
Tesla
Tommy Kaira
Tom's*
TRD*
Trial*
Triumph

(Note: RUF is a tuning shop, but it modifies Porsches. Hence this is a sort-of back door way of getting Porsche's into GT5.)

Manufacturers in Forza 3, but not in Gran Turismo 5:

Bertone* &
Devon &
Gumpert &
Joss &
Kia &
Koenisegg
Land Rover
Morgan &
Mosler &
Porsche
Radical &
Rossion &
Saab
Saturn
Spada &
Weismann &

So what conclusions can we draw from this? At first glance, it looks like GT5 wins hands down; its list is several times longer. However, that's being seriously padded by a large number of tuning shops. Knock the tuning shops (apart from RUF) out of the list and it becomes 25 exclusives for GT5 vs 15 for Forza 3, which is a rather more even match. So next, we need to look at who is on the remaining list.

GT5's remaining exclusives are an eclectic bunch. There are lots of now-defunct vintage manufacturers with some really interesting cars. The really large, well known manufactuers are Daihatsu, Plymouth and Suzuki. There are also a couple of interesting oddities such as Tesla. Over on Forza 3's side, the most striking exclusives have got to be Koenisegg, Land Rover, Porsche and Saab. Most of the other exclusives are relatively obscure but highly modern supercar manufactuerers.

So where does that leave us overall? Well, both games have some surprising omissions which mean that neither can truly claim to be comprehensive. It's difficult to see how GT5 can claim to be the definitive driving sim when it's missing Koenisegg and Porsche. At the same time, Forza 3's omission of Suzuki looks extremely strange. Beyond that, it's clear that the focus is different. GT5 focusses on Japanese tuning cars and classic European cars, while Forza 3 has the emphasis more firmly upon modern supercars, regardless of their origin.

Where's the bug tracker for Slashdot? I'd like to be able to file bugs and feature requests.

Bugs:

1. Link to posting journals is difficult to find. At one time, it was nearly impossible to click, because it was part of a page footer that retreated every time you got near it. (The page body was getting filled with more content as one got closer to the bottom.)
2. List of all my old Journal Entries is difficult to find without already knowing the URL.
3. Enable SSL by default
4. Enable "Public Terminal" checkbox by default, or replace with a "Remember me" checkbox like everyone else has.
5. For some reason, <ul></ul> doesn't work, and I had to switch these lists to <ol></ol>

Feature requests:

1. Offer an explicit programmatic API for managing my user settings, so I can crosspost my blogs to my /. journal, and my 'microblog' statuses to my /. signature.
2. Support conveniently tying my account to major single-sign-on providers who use OpenID and OAuth. Most places will allow me to click a nice, big icon to automate filling in the needed details.
3. Support post convenience features most other social networking sites (hey, remember zoo.pl? You were one of the first social networks on the market.) such as post-by-email, importing/exporting posts from/to some other popular sites/common APIs.

While some of the bugs have been fixed already, it'd have been a lot less grating if there was a good, visible way to report them and follow them as they got fixed.

I've had Fallout: New Vegas for about a week now and thought it worth typing up some early thoughts on the game. I say "early thoughts" as, despite having put about 16 hours into the game so far, I don't really feel like I've explored much of its content. I clocked up over 100 hours with Fallout 3, including time spend with its 5 downloadable content packs, and I can see that New Vegas has the potential to generate similar play-times. So this is not a review; I wouldn't want to try to put a score to the game until I've completed it. Rather, it's a summary of what you can expect to find in the early stages of the game. This is all based on the PC version.

On many levels, not much has changed since Fallout 3. The game is still running on the same (slightly dated) technology and the interface is almost entirely unchanged. If you played Fallout 3, then you'll be instantly familiar with the basic concepts of the game and will be able to move right on to exploring the new features. If Fallout 3 passed you by, then you've probably got a fairly steep learning curve, as not only do you have all of the systems and mechanics that gave the first game its depth to get used to, but you've also got the new reputation and crafting systems to pick up at the same time.

That said, in some respects, New Vegas is a much more newbie-friendly game than Fallout 3. My defining memory of my first 12 or so hours of Fallout 3 is of creeping around with a 9mm pistol with 3 rounds, a broken laser pistol and a single frag grenade. The game could be harsh in its early stages, until you managed to acquire some decent guns and enough caps (the game's currency) to keep yourself provided with ammunition and stimpacks. This situation could be avoided if you had the Operation: Anchorage downloadable content pack, which gave a nice easy method of acquiring a substantial arsenal almost as soon as you left Vault 101, but I suspect that most first-time players won't have had the benefit of that. New Vegas allows you to skip this stage entirely, which may disappoint a few hardcore players, but is probably a welcome relief to the majority. The game's tutorial stages give you a couple of decent starter guns and a fair-sized stock of ammunition. Coupled with an abundance of easy quests in the introductory areas, this should mean that most players will manage to bypass the subsistence phase and get cracking with the rest of the game.

I regard this as a good thing, on balance, because not having to think carefully before you use every single bullet or stimpack removes a huge barrier to exploration. At the same time, the increasing challenge presented by the threats you encounter as you move away from the starter down is a good incentive to hunt through every last ruin for supplies. One of the most enjoyable moments of my time with the game so far came when I carefully picked my way through a plot-unrelated building protected by potentially dangerous sentry robots, picking locks and hacking security systems, in the hope of finding some nice new gear. At the end of my exploration, I came across a unique gun that far exceeded anything I had hoped to find and which instantly became the centrepiece of my arsenal. It felt like the risks I'd taken in going off the beaten track had paid off extremely well. Not every such exploration is as profitable, which is also a positive; you don't go into every little detour with the expectation of epic loot. Inquisitiveness can sometimes backfire, but the risks still feel worth taking.

Going off-plot and exploring is by far the most enjoyable aspect of the game. It's great to stumble across a new town and spend a few hours helping the inhabitants with their problems (or, depending on your faction alignment, just killing them all and looting their homes). The Vegas Strip and the Mojave Desert are far more densely populated than Fallout 3's Capital Wasteland. In places, the world of New Vegas starts to feel almost civilised; this is a world which has started to pick itself up properly following a nuclear war that is fast fading into history. In some ways, it verges on being post-post-apocalypse fiction. That isn't to say that there isn't barbarity; some of the factions in the game have a brutal streak that surpasses anything we saw from the Enclave in Fallout 3.

Sadly, the main plot does not, so far, feel as though it's really doing justice to the game-world. It's lucky that the exploration and side-questing aspects of the game are so good, because I'm finding it very difficult to care about Courier Number 6 or the platinum poker chip he's hunting. I know that Fallout traditionalists objected to Fallout 3's plot, but I personally thought it carried itself off pretty well. It's hard to define where New Vegas falls short in this respect, but I think ultimately, it's missing some of the gravitas of its predecessor. It's not just that New Vegas doesn't go around quoting Revelations 21:6 at you. It's more that the game takes an awfully long time to reveal why your character's mission actually matters. Maybe it will do so eventually, but it hasn't done so yet.

There are other niggles as well. While the dialogue throws up occasional gems, a lot of it comes over extremely flat. With a few honorable exceptions, most of the NPCs you encounter just feel like ciphers for their faction. Don't go into this game expecting the kind of wit and flair you'd find in a Bioware game. Despite some attempts to tidy it up, the companion system still feels uncomfortable. The new "companion wheel" interface helps with orders a bit, but the AI for your companions is still shockingly bad. After a few hours, I dismissed my companion and went back to solo-exploration. Inventory management is still irritating, and is one of the few areas where the game gives away the fact that it was also developed for consoles.

It should be noted that the game has been plagued by bug reports since its launch. I've run into a couple of very minor bugs. A couple of enemies sank up to their knees into the ground at one point, although it didn't stop them from attacking me or me from being able to fight back. The game does occasionally throw up some unexplainable slow-down. My system is far in excess of the recommended specs and never had the slightest problem with Fallout 3, so I'm at a loss to explain this. It's rare, though, and seems to be quite random.

On the plus side, combat feels greatly improved since Fallout 3. The gap between normal combat and VATS combat seems to have been narrowed somewhat, so you don't get the same feeling of being completely ineffective when you don't have the AP to use VATS. Stealth feels better implemented and much more consistent. And the new range of weapons is great, as is the option to modify them.

In conclusion... so far so good. While I do have some minor criticisms, these are pretty thin when set against the sheer awesomeness of the game's exploration elements.

In the last week or two links to external sites on Slashdot generally don't seem to work unless I click several times. This only appears to happen on Firefox... Chrome is unaffected. I haven't tried IE, Safari, or any other browser. Finally fed up with it, I decided to look through the javascript to see if there was anything funky going on. Looks like there's a script being included from leads.demandbase.com that defines some kind of click tracker. Here's a snippet:

• else if(a[i].className.match(/clicky_log_outbound/i)){clicky.add_event(a[i],"mousedown",clicky.outbound);}else{clicky.add_event(a[i],"mousedown",clicky.click);

So if you find you've oddly had to click a few times to RTFA, it's not your mouse button dying. Open up adblock and disable everything from leads.demandbase.com and it will be fixed. Links clicked once in Firefox will properly load as they used to. Thanks Slashdot for using an external company for tracking my click behavior. Though perhaps implementing this poorly is Taco's way of giving us a heads-up. Much like the "Idle" section, his overlords may have mandated the addition of this awesomeness to the site and by making it break it alerts us to what we need to block. In which case, a non-sarcastic thanks is due.

I also found this wonderful gem:

• function pageload_done( $, console, maybe ){
          pageload.after_readycode = (new Date).getTime();
          pageload.content_ready_time = pageload.content_ready - pageload.before_content;
          pageload.script_ready_time = pageload.after_readycode - pageload.content_ready;
          pageload.ready_time = pageload.after_readycode - pageload.before_content; // Only report 1% of cases.
          maybe || (Math.random()>0.01) || $.ajax({ data: {
                  op: 'page_profile',
                  pagemark: pageload.pagemark,
                  dom: pageload.content_ready_time,
                  js: pageload.script_ready_time
          } });
  }

Unless my javascript is really rusty, won't this report 99% of cases?

Anyway, pass this information on so everyone can RTFA without the hassle.

Today, I realized I hadn't told you guys I'm engaged.

I went to tell you, and found Slashdot journals down. I figured they didn't care, but turns out it was brought back up.

Anyway, yeah, I'm engaged to a lovely, smart and funny gal who was already into Linux and tabletop roleplaying when I ran into her. May 20th, 2012.

Not bad for a guy who spent his formative years on Slashdot.

It's amazing how people try to rationalize away the phrase "I could care less", much in the same way that Star Wars apologists try to rationalize the use of parsecs when talking about the Kessel Run. Maybe there are black holes to navigate around, and minimizing the distance is the sign of a good pilot, or maybe this, or maybe that... or maybe George Lucas just made a mistake, you know?

So when it comes to people rationalizing away "I could care less" as being some nonchalant way of saying "yeah, I could but I'm not going to bother" I just don't buy it. It's a misquote of the perfectly unambiguous phrase "I couldn't care less". So when I stumbled across a rationalization of that, my mind wandered upon what I think is a pretty damned good analogy of why it doesn't make sense: I could eat more.

Hey, for anyone who still reads this. Rosetta Code's doing awesome, content-wise, and we're starting to implement Semantic MediaWiki. (To what end? Not sure. I've got a couple ideas, but I'm more an opportunist than a front-end planner.) I've also been shooting a bunch of photos and putting them up online--even photos that aren't cosplay, if you can imagine that. (Which you probably can; I doubt many who read this were following me on Flickr back when I went to Anime Weekend Atlanta for the first time in 2007. If you want to read what I'm really thinking, either follow me on Multiply, or see the same stuff over on LiveJournal--but get your adblock armor up; it's a scary place. I'm also on Twitter, if you really care. I'm a minimal participant, really.

If I show up as a fan for you here, I do read your journals; the My Amigos RSS feed is still useful.

Why this collection of links to me at other places? Easy; I know there are still some of you here who never showed up in those other places, and I miss the interactions. I'd post my blogs here, too, but Slashdot has relegated itself to an incredible degree of backwater status. I was lucky to find the "Write in Journal" link. I'm tempted to find some Perl script to have it suck in blog posts via RSS, and post them to Slashdot. (That's how I'm inducting my blog posts into Facebook, too.)

I miss what this place used to be. I miss the people this place used to have. I still see some of them on two or three other social networks, and some of the bonds there are tighter than they ever were here, but there's still a bunch of you missing.

So... after years of rumour and months of hype, Starcraft 2 is finally out. While I'm perfectly happy to play games on the Xbox 360 or PS3, I must admit that on one level, it is actually nice to see a substantial degree of hype surrounding a PC-exclusive game. I can't remember the last time I encountered this for a game whose name didn't include the word "Sims". However, hype always carries a risk of overshadowing the all-important queston of "is it actually any good".

On the basis of my early experiences (around 5-6 hours play), I'm going to cover that question not from the point of view of a hardcore Starcraft fan (largely because I'm not a hardcore Starcraft fan), but rather from the point of view of a generalist gamer looking for entertainment. I'm not particularly interested in the detailed intricacies of the multiplayer balance, but rather in whether the campaign, skirmish and multiplayer modes are likely to prove enjoyable to the average player.

The first thing to note, I suppose, is that the game requires the player to be logged into battle.net to play. This means that you need to have an internet connection present every time you fire up the game, even if you bought a boxed copy and even if you are only interested in the single-player campaign. That said, I did do a quick "yank out the network cable" test after loading up and unlike Assassin's Creed 2 or Command & Conquer 4, the game did not just freeze up. However, a more prolonged test would be needed to determine just what exactly stops working if the network connection is lost. Some minor consolation can perhaps be found in the fact that the login servers seemed to stay functional even on launch day (which is a first) and that purchasers of boxed copies do not need to have the disc in their drives to play.

And the game itself? My first impression is that it's a bit of a mixed bag. The first shock for me on loading up and starting the single-player campaign was how little had changed since 1998. For me, this was a disappointment. The RTS genre has come a long way since then and it was irritating not to see more of a nod towards this progress. In particular, the UI is a clunky and screen-filling mess. In 1998, it wasn't too bad, but in 2010, even running in 1680x1050, it feels a lot like being forced to play the game while peering through a letterbox. The UI layout is essentially identical to the original game's, and again, this seems dated. Unless you're prepared to memorise all of the keyboard shortcuts (which the hardcore will be, but more casual players probably won't), the interface for ordering around units and building structures will feel slow and clunky.

There have been a couple of small (and welcome) tweaks to the UI. Most notably, the unit-pane has been revamped to remove the previously strict limit on the number of units that could be selected at a single time). This is a very positive step, but it would still have been nice to see more work put into creating a more ergonomic and less visually intrusive UI. The gradual evolution of WoW's UI has shown that Blizzard do have some talented people in this field, and I'm not sure why they weren't put to work on this.

The units from Starcraft and Brood Wars all seem to be back, complete with some balance tweaks and changes to the build tree. The line-up is fleshed out by some new additions, which seem to fit in reasonably well, at least to a layman's eyes.

The campaign structure is somewhat changed from the original. Of course, only the Terran campaign is present at the moment, with the Zerg and Protoss campaigns to be added by future expansions. I've not finished it yet, but the Terran campaign does seem to be reasonably large; certainly larger than its equivalent in the original Starcraft. The campaign now feels very similar to that from Dawn of War 2, with the player choosing from missions with different rewards and outcomes. Credits earned during missions can be used to purchase upgrades to the various unit and building types.

Campaign missions are somewhat variable in quality. There's a fair degree of variety in the objectives, with missions including the standard "build a base and destroy the enemy" to escort missions and infiltration assignments. Sometimes the missions work well. However, the pacing of some of the missions, particularly the early ones, often feels a bit off. On the third campaign mission, I had to defend a base from attack for 20 minutes (similar to the third mission in the original Starcraft's campaign). However, on normal difficulty, I had destroyed the bases the enemy was using to produce attackers by around 13 minutes into the mission. Rather than ending the mission, the game forced me to sit twiddling my thumbs until the timer ticked down. Ok, it threw a few underwhelming waves of enemies at me right at the end, but this didn't really alleviate the substantial levels of boredom I'd experienced. There's also a badly paced convoy-escort mission where you can expect to spend a lot of time waiting.

Other missions, however, do work better. The "build a base and destroy everything" missions work pretty well, though they do get samey. The missions that put you in charge of a Ghost are a lot of fun indeed. That saidyou won't really be seeing any mission designs that you haven't seen in any number of other games. The new mercenaries system adds a slight extra twist to the gameplay, but again, nothing stunningly original.

I did have a general issue relating to game-pace. When it was released, the original Starcraft was widely seen as a rusher's paradise. However, expectations in the RTS genre have shifted a lot since then, and faster build and unit production speeds are now the norm. While actual combat in Starcraft 2 feels fluid and well-paced, build and production times feel positively glacial. Research times feel outright sadistic. It's clearly not a case of the game just running too slowly, though, as combat can be outright frantic (usually in a good way).

It's hard to describe the in-game visuals as anything other than disappointing. It could be argued that the blocky, cartoony look is just part of Blizzard's style, and I'd be perfectly happy to accept this if it had been implemented a bit better. However, background and terrain art looks ancient, while the quality of unit visuals is highly variable. Some units, like the Terran SCV, actually look pretty good and have had fairly funky redesigns. Others, however, such as the Terran Firebat, look as though they've been drawn by a 6 year old. They're bad enough when seen in isolation, but when you get a few of them grouped together, their mis-sized graphics blend together leaving an ugly mess in the middle of the screen.

It's a real pity, because it's clear that Starcraft 2 is running on top of some very capable technology. The pre-rendered cutscenes that are a hallmark of Blizzard games are back, though there aren't perhaps quite as many of them as we've come to expect. They're complemented by some reasonably impressive cutscenes using the in-game engine. These are actually on a par with the game-engine cutscenes from many first and third person shooters, which is an impressive feat for an RTS engine. Arguably even more impressive is the vertically-scrolling shooter they've created using the engine, which can be accessed from one of the between-mission screens. This is a fully featured shooter with bullet-hell tendancies which compares favourably to many games from the same genre available via Xbox Live Arcade or the Playstation Network.

The game does an excellent job of building atmosphere between missions; indeed, it's hard to think of any games that do it better. You can explore various locations via a point and click interface, talking to characters, watching news broadcasts and examining various keepsakes and trophies. It's a bit reminiscent of the old Wing Commander games, only better. These sections have a great visual style and even better sound and music. The game's voice-acting is consistently top-notch, while the twangy musical score is reminiscent of some of the stuff we heard during the original Starcraft's cutscenes and perhaps even more reminiscent of Firefly/Serenity. The lyrics to one of the songs on the jukebox had me laughing out loud.

Moving on from the campaign mode, the Skirmish mode is pretty decent, with a good range of difficulty settings to allow even the greenest of RTS players to get some practice in before heading online.

The online play was, much to my surprise, working just fine for me on launch day (perhaps cynically, I tend to expect features like this in major releases to be more or less unusable until at least 48 hours after launch). There are a good range of maps and play-options, and those hardcore players looking to get the Starcraft 2 online scene rolling are unlikely to be disappointing. The matchmaking tool was working a bit erratically in terms of finding players of around my skill-level, but this is probably to be expected so soon after launch, with so many players on brand new accounts with very limited play histories. Hopefully that will iron itself out in time.

The lack of any option to play the campaign in co-op will be disappointing for some players, but on the other hand, it is nice to be able to play a campaign solo without feeling like you're missing out (Red Alert 3, I'm looking at you).

So in conclusion; if you were a huge Starcraft fan, you probably haven't read this anyway, as you've already bought the game and are no doubt playing it right now. If you haven't bought the game and are wondering whether to... well... maybe. There is fun to be had here, with a decent single-player story and bags of atmosphere, I suspect most people who enjoy RTSes will find something to please them. However, this is very much an old-fashioned game, missing many of the innovations and conveniences we've come to take for granted over the last decade. In many ways, games such as Dawn of War and Supreme Commander 2 are far more sophisticated and... yes... better than this. That's not to say that you shouldn't give Starcraft 2 a go. It's just to say that if you only play one RTS every decade or so, this probably isn't the one to pick.

This journal entry is to share (and save) this totally awesome thread:

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1511824&cid=30777214

In the final follow-up emails involved with fixing my Internet service, I asked for, and was provided with, specific references to usage caps and usage monitoring.

I have to say, with the addition of email and twitter support channels, their customer service has improved by leaps and bounds in the past three years I've been a customer.