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While we're on this subject, does anyone have any idea why any audio or video files I download through Firefox end up heavily distorted or totally unplayable? And is there any way to stop it? I'm pretty much a Firefox convert now, so it's annoying to have to switch back to IE every time I want to get one of those files.

Being around cats most of my life has taught me that if you buy a product specifically designed for cats to use, from catflaps to baskets to scatching posts, they'll most likely go out of their way not to use it (litter trays thankfully being an exception).

Obviously these things work for some people, but when it comes to cats reacting to things exactly as you hope they will, it's best not to get your hopes up.

Benedict XVI sounds more like a sci-fi tv series then a religious leader. "He's the crime-solving cyborg who plays by his own rules!"

As a lover of good platformers and an even bigger lover of all things Schafer, I want to play this BAD. But it's not going to happen any time soon, what with this rickety old pc of mine.

It'll be a shame not to have a full collection of Schafer games for the first time in a while. I might buy it anyway just to hang the box on my wall.

Whoops, apparently Eccleston has quit as the Doctor.

I can see why an actor might think spending months and months working on the same role would be harmful for their career, but still it's disappointing news. And you'd think everyone involved would at least wait till the end of the series before announcing it.

Anyway, I think it'd be fun if they 'degenerated' the character back into Paul McGann, who never really got a proper shot at it.

Good to see a rare mention of Captain Blood here. That game is super-stylish to this day.

First one that comes to mind for graphical loveliness is The Dig, for me. Some of the backgrounds in that game are sublime.

The best comparision between "filmized" cinemagic shows and regular shows is Red Dwarf, and Red Dwarf ReMastered. There is quite a difference.

Is that the thing where they reprocess the video footage, altering the framerate to give it that pseudo-film quality? It's usually pretty horrendous when they do that, I think.

I wish they'd just gone with film for this Dr Who, because the ugliness really bothered me - not helped by the slightly odd, slightly crap directing. I get the feeling it'll bug me through the whole thing, but I'm hoping the writing and performances will shine through in the end.

I doubt this new Dr Who is low budget by modern BBC standards, though. They seem to be hoping for a saturday night ratings winner, so I imagine they invested quite a bit in it. Admittedly a high budget BBC show is probably nothing compared to a big budget US show.

It was alright - I thought Eccleston was very good indeed.

But ooh, I just hate that slick, plasticy look all these modern high(er) budget BBC productions always have. At a time when US TV dramas can look every bit as great as high budget cinema productions, I find this kind of ugly, fake look very hard to swallow, to be honest.

We'll have to see how well they pull off regular storylines to really get an idea of how well it's working, of course. But I can't getting the feeling that once the novelty value wears off, it won't last too long. The whole thing kind of reminds me of that Randal and Hopkirk remake from a few years back, unfortunatly.

Thanks for the quick response, my good man!

I wasn't sure if the thing I have was the same one you were talking about, but now I'll definitely give those programs you linked to a go tommorrow. My PC is so clogged with junk after all these years that i'm planning to start afresh either way, like I said, but learning how to beat this thing wouldn't do me any harm at all.

And don't worry - I won't blame you if everything somehow goes all to hell.

Sorry to drag this up, but I seem to have the same virus people are talking about here: IE opens with about:blanks, and every time I use explorer AVG finds an se.dll file that resurrects itself as soon as it's deleted. I've looked all over the internet for a solution, but I can't find one that works - every bad file I delete just comes right back.

But what I'm mainly interested in now are the odds of me spreading this virus to other PCs. See, I was planning to wipe my hard drive anyway, but I'm wary of shifting any of the countless files I want to keep onto another PC, just in case I end up infecting that one as well.

I've scanned all the files I want to take over, they seem to be clean, and I'm hoping that as it seems to be an internet based virus it has nothing to do with my files. but I'm still not 100% sure enough to actually do it.

Does anyone have any idea exactly how safe that process would be? Should a well prepared PC be able to detect anything I might inadvertantly take over?

If anyone can help me with this, it'd really be appreciated. And once I finally sort this out I promise never to use Internet Explorer again.

3D heals wounds both physical and psychological.

They're classics! Albeit very flawed classics. I liked the references to it in Pleurghburg.

I really loved that tracking system that lets you follow the progress of the different suspects as they move about the map, going about their murdering business and getting killed. But like a lot of these old games some of the puzzles were insanely harsh, and some of those action sequences were damn near impossible. The story was a little muddled, also. it's a shame the series ended on a cliffhanger, though.

Ah, good ol' Operation Stealth. I thought it was tense and atmospheric as all hell when I was a kid, and I still think there's some really good stuff in it (never knew about this pseudo-vocal version, though.). But when I played it again a while back it hadn't aged too wonderfully in some respects. One of those adventures that's hardly any fun without a walkthrough nearby - some REALLY unfair dead ends in there.

I'm pretty sure that all of FOA's music was original, aside from the main Indy theme. That original music is fantastic, so I have no problem calling it a great soundtrack.

Grim Fandango is probably my favourite, though I'm a big fan of the Dig soundtrack as well. The Monkey Island soundtracks are generally fantastic of course (for my money the music was the only truly great thing about Monkey Island III).

I find on the whole it's hard to go wrong with a Michael Land or Peter McConnel score.

This autumn must surely be the best period for stop-motion movies there's ever been. That's saying practically nothing, admittedly, but still, you won't find me complaining. Wallace and Gromit is/are the best thing(s) ever.

What do you people mean when you say "The follow up to Nightmare Before Christmas"?

It's just a movie in the same art style. It has nothing to do with Nightmare Before Christmas as far as I have read. It takes place in the real world, not halloween town.

Eric

Well I know story wise they're unconnected, but if a film is made in the same style and (aside from the lamentable absence of director Henry Selick) from almost the exact same creative team as Nightmare, and all for the first time since the release of that film, I don't think it's unfair or inaccurate to loosely refer to that film as a follow up.

I would have prefered to see what would have happened to Lucas if he directed Apocalypse Now as he intended instead of following the Star Wars path.

Me too. Based on everything I've read on the subject it would've ended up almost completely different - supposedly he was planning on filming the thing in a realistic documentary style, and was pretty disappointed when Coppola took over and made it all psychedelic and dreamlike. His vision was so different maybe that it might have been worth him tackling a war film of his own? Probably too late for that now, of course. His premature retirement really was quite a shame I think.

By the way, has anyone ever noticed that (as far as I can see) Lucas has never in his life been creatively involved a film that was set at the time it was made? That says quite a bit about the guy, I think, though i'm not sure whether or not what it says is good or bad.

The GTA games are fun, inventive and often genuinely clever and hilarious (especially with the wonderful radio stuff). The whole thing is far more tongue-in-cheek and cartoony then it's often given credit for. It's not really 'gritty' at all - the tone is often silly as much as anything. I really think the series earned its popularity.

Anyway, down to business. I don't tend to win many friends by voicing these kind of opinions on this forum, but here I go.

I doubt adventure games (at least in the logic/item puzzle-based format most here recognise) will ever make a comeback. In gameplay terms it's a very limited genre and its death was fairly inevitable because there was no obvious way to keep the gameplay fresh and relevant in the face of games like the GTAs that offer far more freedom and direct interaction.

The storylines, characters and dialogue were still strong, but the fundamentals of the gameplay were increasingly stale – much as I adore Grim Fandango, I have to admit most of that love is due to the story, characters, voice-acting, artwork and music, rather then the actual gameplay mechanics.Ã,  The fundamentals of the gameplay in traditional graphic adventures has barely advanced since Maniac Mansion: moving around static environments solving the same old item-combination puzzles.

For adventure games to return to the cutting edge they need to become dramatically more interactive both in terms of the storylines and environments. If and when the time comes when it's feasible for players to genuinely and uniquely influence the direction of storylines and characters (and I mean far beyond the odd branching story path), I think that'll be the point when adventures make a return, albeit in a very different form.

I do think there’s now a real gap in the games industry for games that provide non-action driven storytelling. If someone can come up with a fresh, fun way of filling that gap, I think the public could really take to it. But saying "traditional graphic adventures will be back because everything moves in cycles" is wishful thinking. I mean, you could make the same statement about text adventures.

Ah, yet another of the most over-discussed subjects on the internet, along with George Bush and "Reasons why the Simpsons isn't good anymore".

I'll chip in anyway. The ludicrous amount of hate piled on the Star Wars prequels on the internet only makes me want to like them. And I do! Within reason anyway.

The characters, acting and dialogue are weaker on the whole, and they lack charm, but if you can look past that and drop any convoluted ideas about what you'd rather they were, I find there's actually a lot to enjoy in them. CGI or not, the films often look lovely, they have some great action sequences and the way the story is contructed so as to have the key plotline of the emperor's rise to power occuring almost entirely in the background is quite cleverly done. I certainly rank them far above most of the summer blockbusters of recent years.

It's kind of interesting that I only started appreciating the prequels after i'd pretty much lost interest in Star Wars, though (interesting to me, anyway). I don't really feel that strongly about any of them, these days, but I'm looking forward to the next one.

Nightmare Before Christmas is terrific and my mind automatically rejects all statements to the contrary.

As for who I think should've played the guide... I always thought Richard Briers would've been a good choice, because he generally has a very similar tone to the guy who originally played the book in the radio and tv versions (Peter Jones?).

And the radio series definately came first.