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er... thats some weird-ass cell shading they've got there.

I see a clear need for some form of transportation that allows you to trample other cars beneath your wheels. http://www.bizbash.com/content/editorial/mediafiles/e904sho_01_0414_MonsterTrucksAtAutoShow_4_320.jpg">

Ah, see, yer GTA style games not about the driving/racing, its about the stealing peoples cars and then reversing over them. I don't know if other people actually try to drive properly, but I usually progress from point A to point B by bouncing of off of things, leaving a trail of burnt out cars and squashed civillians in my wake. If the makers of The Getaway have missed out this essential point then, well, its probably not the game for me.

Even if you do get to play a cockerney ganster 'oo loves 'is mum and wouldn't 'urt a fly 'cept for tose other gansters, 'oo all 'ad it coming the bleedin lot of 'em cor blimey carver 'ale.

Hmm... I don't know about Medal Of Honor, but if your playing online the Halflife modification Day Of Defeat is excellent WWII action, whith the best implemented machineguns in any FPS I've seen. Theres nothing quiote like finding a good position with your MG42, setting up your bipod and mowing down wave after wave of Johnny Yank until some clever sod tops you with a grenade. And playing the obligatory Normandy landing level on the american sideis great, in a Zen kind of way. Spawn-die, spawn-die, over and over... If you ever get to the top you feel like a superhero.

Anyone sussed out if The Getaway is as good yet? The idea of tearing round the actual streets of London doing crimes in a GTA3 stylee is intriguing to me, though I suspect it may be a bit limited if that?s its one gimmick.

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Er, if Thargs not real then who edits the comic?

My one criticism would be the appallingly slow download times of the images. These guys really want to look at optimising their jpgs.

Ah... part fish, part man, part lobster, ALL monster...

That takes me back...

Link: http://www.backfromthedepths.co.uk/expandable%20piccies/frontcovers/pages/NFRONT%20PAGE%2014_jpg.htm" target="_blank">The Sea Beast

Hmmm... Acording to Freeman Dyson a space elevator would be impossible as any material with sufficient tensile strength would, when stretched out to its limit by gravitational forces, effectively be a high-explosive.

Theres also Bonzi, the company responsible for some of the more irritating pop-up adds and currently the subject of a Class Action.

Link: http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/02/12/04/0114222.shtml?tid=95" target="_blank">http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/02/12/04/0114222.shtml

AH, come on, that kind of splash page madness isn't nearly as prevalent now as it was during the 90s...

Like a lot of people here I was drawn away from 2000ad to American comics primarily by titles written by ex-2000ad writers (Alan Moore in particular). Part of the appeal was it was a similar density of comic, but 22pages worth! You couldn't beat that. And it meant that you got substantial stories within a single issue, or major story arcs withing 3-6 issues. Bonus!

Fashions swung away from density since then, but I still think those comics read well (Even Swamp Thing, which pushes the proliferation of captions to new heights) and theres still a palce for density in comics. There *certainly* a place for a little more of it in tooth, with its inbuilt 5-page limit.

Of course, maybe everyone just needs to be Alan Moore.

**Grmph**

It?s a bit fiddly finding it, so I'm going to cut-n-paste it here, hope no-one minds:

(...following on from some other peoples comments about Carver Hale...)

The problem was this. I'd done some Future Shocks and Pulp Sci-Fi's for 2000AD, all of them during Andy's time as Tharg, and I'd made a reasonably good fist of structuring a complete story in five pages. Andy gave me some excellent advice on structure and pacing within the very tight limits of a Future Shock, and I think all those stories worked out okay - especially "Doing Time".

But taking a longer story and breaking it down into five-page episodes is a different discipline again, and I don't think I really cracked it either with Carver Hale or with 13. The trick is to make each instalment work as a set piece, with lots of action, but always to keep moving the story forward too. Okay, that's banal and obvious, but the temptation to do the first and forget the second, or skimp on the second, is *huge*.

So I feel bad about Carver, particularly in view of the superb black and white art that Mike Perkins did on it, and the supportive (not intrusive) editing. It should have been better. If I go back to writing for 2000AD at any point, I'm going to take a completely different approach to planning the story. Three times is the charm.

Its worth noting that these days 2000ad has more or less the same page-density as an  American comic, so that you don't get very much in your 5 page thrill (compare this with the "good old days", when we could boast that a 6 page thrill crammed in as much action as any of the, clerarly inferior, American comics. Ahh... Those were the days).

Theres nothing wrong with low page density, but I think it works a lot better when you've got more pages to play with. Japanese comics are super low density, and read really well in big phonebook sized albulms, but are incredibly frustrating when cut into 22page blocks.