TOM FRANCIS
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Relic Announce That Tom Francis Is Right

It takes a lot to make me completely forget about TF2 at time like this, but this’ll do it:

The Tyranids are in, they’re beautiful and they’re huge:

As I said back when no-one believed me, the last trailer completely gave it away: the explanations for that descending cloud of spores the pessimists came up with were just hilarious. It’s a cloud of orks. It’s a warp storm, only lower, and brown, and made of spores. Gamers seem to have a limitless capacity to believe the worst.

The reason Tyranids are a big deal, at least the reason they were always my favourite Warhammer 40,000 race, is what they’re made of. They’re not glistening pus like other aliens, or tissue paper insects. They’re clean pale bone, hard and sharp as diamond, acting as one conscious many-bladed machine.

In other news, Valve Announce That Tom Francis Was Right To Say That The SomethingAwful Secrecy-Impaired Testers Were Right About The Sandvich, And That Tim Edwards Was Right About The New Video.

Team Fortress 2 Goes To The Rockies

So the new game mode is a sudden-death single-control point mini-match, suited to fewer players. More like suited to no players! Because of how it might suck! Lol!

Seriously, though, I’m guessing the presence of a single control point negates what does suck about Sudden Death: the tendency for both teams to hole up at their base and wait until stalemate is announced. If you turtle up at the point, you can cap it and win rather than waiting for the enemy to come to you. If you turtle up before the point, the enemy can cap it and win rather than coming to you. I’m optimistic.

A delicious new environment for the chaps and Pyro! It’s quite, quite lovely – in some ways, even more stylised than the canyon motif we’ve been stuck with until now. The backdrop in this shot is just a few colours:

I’m a big fan of game environments that can feel cold without just blanketing the whole place in unconvincing snow. This definitely qualifies – can’t you just smell how brisk and bracing that mountain air is?

That set of tips from the SomethingAwful testers has now been proven so right that it’s had to be deleted from the Steam forums. In Arena’s case, knowing the broad picture wasn’t very helpful: the details that there’s a single control point, and it can have any number of players, completely change the prospect to a rather exciting one.

But if you still doubt that the last Heavy unlock will be a health-restoring munchable named the Sandvich that replaces the Shotgun, you are now officially delusional.

Steel Yourself

The grand Team Fortress 2 update goes live tomorrow night, and there’ll be more details on what it contains tonight and tomorrow. I doubt the new community map, cp_steel, will be top of your trying-out priority list, but I hope you’ll get to it eventually. It’s an intriguing, ever-changing map, in a player-driven way rather than a random way like Hydro. It’s no less puzzling than Hydro though (I’m hoping some extra signposts are added in the ‘official’ version), so this clear, simple diagram by Ankich should make everything apparent right away.

In theory:

In practise:

Wait, wait, that diagram is actually helpful. Obviously you need to see it full size. An awesome Valve-style video explains the basics when you first play the map, but what you really need to know is how to play it well. How many of the map-changing points should you try for until you make a dash for the final, game-winning one?

I’ve been playing it whenever I can, and I’m really enjoying it so far. At the moment it feels weighted towards the attackers: we had a perfect round on Blu this lunchtime, where it went into overtime as we were capping C, we got shot off C, all our progress towards capturing C was undone, and just as it hit zero a cheeky Scout lept on E: the only cap that matters. We couldn’t even hold that consistently, but I kept as many of them as I could busy at C and eventually our forces at E won out, and we won with zero seconds on the clock.

Then the teams switched and we got destroyed. So I think we were actually sucking on offense, it’s just an offense-friendly map. But blasting Scouts off that final cap in the middle of a chasm feels like what the Soldier was born to do, so defense is still fun.

Vote Tom Francis In The Games Media Awards

Holy shit, apparently I’m a finalist in the Games Media Award for Best Specialist Games Writer – Print. The winner’s decided solely by votes, and “Voting is open to all MCV readers”, so just by reading that sentence I quoted from MCV, you qualify. If you want to be extra-qualified, go and read www.mcvuk.com for a sec, then vote (gma@intentmedia.com).

You can also vote for PC Gamer for Best Games Magazine, and a bunch of PC Gamer contributors who apparently call themselves Rock Paper Shotgun these days, for Best Games Website. In fact, you could vote for the whole of Team Awesome, as we’re called when we fight crime together on the streets of Bath at night.

If you actually want to read something I wrote for PC Gamer, I reported on those virtual assassins, kept a war diary, failed monumentally at Football Manager, and investigated the effectiveness of awkward flirting in MMORPGs. The SWAT 4 movie script I wrote here was also used in the mag.

The other finalists in my category are Rick Porter, who has long hair and one of those not-quite-a-moustache moustaches, Joel Snape who must work right next to me but I can’t remember which one he is, Jon Blyth, who once killed a seventy-two year-old man right in front of me for no reason, Ben Talbot who I don’t know at all, and Alex Wiltshire, who is lovely but works anonymously for the Edge collective, so it’s impossible to actually know what he wrote. Except when you’re both reviewing the same game and he WILDLY OVER-RATES IT and you don’t.

Also, they all just e-mailed me to say they think you’re a jive sucker. They told me not to tell you they said that, but I thought you should know.

Heavy Update: Sandwiches And Fresh Green Grass

The ongoing story here is that Valve pronounced their expected batch of unlockable weapons for the Heavy would also include an unexpected fan-made map, cp_steel, a brand new Payload map, Badwater Basin, a whole new game mode, still unnamed, and five new maps ‘arenas’ for that mode.

They’re revealing these elements day by day until the whole thing goes live on Tuesday (probably around 8pm BST, I’d guess). The latest is that the replacement minigun, Natascha, slows enemies ‘for an instant’ when they’re hit. But the real news is the image of the thing: not the gun itself, but that the blurred scenery the Heavy is standing in is green grass and grey rocks: a type of terrain so far unseen in any TF2 map.

Mess of original post and updates follows:

Sandwiches: While the names might be enigmatic and the descriptions missing, if you download the icon set for the Heavy achievements Valve have just revealed, the filenames are more explicit about what they’re for. The interesting ones, name then filename:

Konspicuous Konsumption – Eat Sandwiches
To regain health, one assumes. Something Awful hint was “Think PopEye”.

Sypalectical Materialism – Uncover Spies
Combined with the Something Awful hint “Think Ghostbusters” I wouldn’t be surprised if they did a Medigun that did nothing except turn red when used on a Spy. Also, I once said to Robin Walker and Erik Johnson, “You guys should make a Medigun that lights up when it’s used on a Spy” and they said “That’s a good idea”. Then I saw them take notes, then scurry off to their PCs, and make that, and put it in the Heavy update.

More probably, as several commenters say, it’s just an achievement for hitting Spies while they’re cloaked, and nothing to do with seeing through disguises.

And not for nothing, but that Spy has a giant freaking silencer.

0wn The Means Of Production – Clear Stickybombs
The interesting thing here is the icon – that’s not a Sticky being pushed back slightly, it’s breaking. Not also the zero in ‘own’, to emphasise how totally pwnsome the means by which you do this is.

Five Second Plan – Teleport Fast Kill
This is probably just for killing people shortly after you come out of a teleporter, but there could be more to it.

Update! Craig points out that this compilation of the SomethingAwful hints is now two-for-two. The third unlock, according to this, is a minigun that slows people down. If true, a) I will be surprised, b) there will be riots, and c) ha! In your face people who said the Hobbler could never be done because slowing people down is always a bad idea! I may entirely agree with your claim and not even really like my own idea, but if Valve do it it’s automatically right.

Day Two! Click the image for details, and the names of all the achievements. Some of them strongly hint at what the other unlocks might be. Others – Pushkin the Cart, Stalin the Cart and Permanent Revolution – are just genius.

TF2 blog has the official word, the Heavy update site is detailing the changes day by day, and it all goes live one week from today. Holy, holy shit.

Five of the new maps are for the new game mode, all of which is currently mysterious. The sixth new map is a new Payload one focusing on wide-open spaces, and the smart money is on this being the oft-mentioned one where the cart is a platform you can build Sentries on. The seventh is an officialised version of cp_steel, that incredibly awesome-sounding changing map Chris blogged about ages ago and for which I’ve never been able to find a good server running.

Worth mentioning: some goons at Something Awful claimed to have playtested the update and offered enigmatic hints as to its content a while back. One of the three said, against all odds, that the Heavy update would come with a new game mode.

Another says “think Popeye”, but also claims the update will cost money, which is patently false.

The third says “think ghostbusters… it’s really that weird.”

Edit: Seven! Seven new maps! Maths degree, right here!

Chris Livingston Stops Considering A TF2 Comic

Our fiendish plan to get our hopes up so much that he couldn’t bear to let us down has failed. Chris, author of the enormous and excellent Half-Life 2 comic Concerned, has decided against doing one in TF2 for various annoyingly valid reasons. He doesn’t mention this one, but Jesus Christ have you ever tried posing something exactly the way you want it in Garry’s Mod? It’s like balancing a kitchen knife on an oiled marble.

I find that I am not disappointed at all. I’ve no doubt it would have been great, but a twice-weekly giggle doesn’t seem like such a big deal compared to the fantastic source of entertainment 1Blog has become. Without this procrastinating placeholder for the vapourware TF2 comic, Living In Oblivion, one of my favourite pieces of games writing in years, might have stayed a still-born non-blog.

1Fort has also provided me with news of the man who is only invisible while performing a forward roll, the real Team Fortress 2 stats system, the best screenshot ever, and an actual Team Fortress 2 comic: Red Spy.

Plus, I’ve always kind of wanted a place where “Tom Francis Ruins Team Fortress 2” is a real headline. Somewhere other than the Tom Francis Sucks newsletter, anyway.

Here’s to a long future of non-adventure, experimental side-projects and TF2 commentary.

Seriously, Buy Braid

Braid is a Mario clone with a time-rewinding gimmick that lets you go back as far as you like to rectify any mistakes. Actually, scratch that.

Braid is an homage to Mario that uses the reversal of time as a central game mechanic to remove the frustrations of platform gaming. Well, no.

Braid is puzzle game that starts from the basic concepts of Mario – most prominently jumping on enemies’ heads – but uses this merely as the basic medium for puzzles that require you to manipulate the flow of time.

And although in its 1st chapter this only amounts to reversing time to correct mistakes, from the 2nd chapter onwards you encounter enemies and objects that don’t go back to how they were when you rewind everything else. On the one hand, these elements are harder to deal with because they keep on going while you’re backtracking.

Braid is a platform puzzler in which you have the power to reverse time, but each of its six chapters interferes with, subverts or adds to this ability to completely reinvent the way you play.

On the other, it allows you manipulate how they synch up with the rest of the world, which actually gives you greater control over them. If there’s a rewind-immune door, for example, you can use up a key unlocking it, then rewind time to before you did so. The door will stay open, but you won’t have used up the key.

 

The 3rd chapter links the flow of time to your position in space, so you have to keep moving to the right for time to progress. If you move to the left, time goes backwards. While you’re standing still, the whole world is frozen. This is madness, because it means that if a patrolling monster is in your way as you climb up a ladder, you can’t wait for him to move out of the way. He will always be at that point in time when you’re at that point in space.

 

The 4th chapter allows you to use your rewind ability to co-operate with another copy of yourself. Yeah, the copy is created when you stop rewinding: he runs off and does what you did the first time, while you’re free to do something different simultaneously. Exactly. So if a switch needs to be held to keep a door open, go and hold it, then rewind time and walk over to the door… …and Mr Unoriginal will run off obediently and pull the switch just like you did.

One time I had to put this guy into position to pull a switch that wouldn’t be there until he came to replay my actions. So when I was standing where the switch would be, I just hammered the Use button to make sure my copy would get it. Then when I rewound and stood on the platform it was supposed to raise, the thing just gibbered spastically up and down – that idiot was hammering his Use button, and each press was reversing the lift’s direction. Dick.

The 5th chapter lets you drop a ring that slows time intensely for things near to it, and slightly for those further away.

With it, you can re-synchronise every clockwork element of Braid’s complex levels.

It’s the most

Flexible

Your toolset gets.

There’s one puzzle where three or four of us discovered we’d all approached it in different ways.

Mine involved killing myself over and over again by repeatedly headbutting monsters in the ass to keep them locked up in a cubby hole until I was ready to kill them.

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Braid Is Out On Filthy Consoles

As Mike Gapper on Xbox World puts it: get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, GET IT!

Disclaimer: I haven’t got it, but I’ve played the PC version – which is coming later this year – at various stages of development. I’ll update this post once I’ve had a moment to try the finished thing on filthy Xbox.

James regular Jason L deserves profound thanks for putting me onto this, long, long before it was cool, and I hope he and anyone else who plays it will take a sec to weigh in on the end product here.

It’s a platform game in which you can rewind time as far as you like, and each chapter layers another mechanic on top of that. The best creates a shadow-you each time you stop rewinding, and the shadow-you runs off and does what you did the first time while you try to co-operate with him. You. Scle.

It’s been getting maximum scores (it got 9/10 in Edge, but Edge only give 10s when they’re wrong, so 9 is the maximum possible correct score), and will likely continue to do so. Those places will use words like “ingenious”, “astonishing”, “staggering”, “masterpiece”, so I don’t have to. Some will mention art, triggering a thousand irritated sighs. One of them insists it is just like The Watchmen, though in what sense is still unclear after a paragraph of strenuous explanation.

My thing is, this is unlike anything we’ve played before, it’s a constant delight, and the second best puzzle game I’ve ever played. It’s $15 or £10, and if you think this is too much you are a small and boring man or maness.

Update: I should say, though, that it has a some problematic bits. The full thing, now that I’ve played it, is effectively identical to the early PC version I’d had a go with, but this time through I’m not moving on from each world until I’ve got all the puzzle-pieces. Which means I’m solving a lot of puzzles I just skipped over last time – you don’t need to get any of them to actually progress, until the very end.

There’s one puzzle in World 2 that can’t be solved when you first reach the level it’s on. And it uses a counter-intuitive mechanic that’s never used before or since without explaining it.

There’s another in World 3 where a problem at the start of the level can’t be solved until you ignore it, leave the area, and then encounter another one-off unexplained mechanic that renders it irrelevant.

These two bits are problems because there are lots of seemingly impossible puzzles in Braid with brilliantly clever solutions. So having a couple that actually are impossible with the current apparatus betrays the player’s confidence that there is a solution to the harder puzzles, that he won’t be wasting his time if he sits there and really thinks about it. Because of these two, sometimes, he is.

World 4 is the only one where the new mechanic isn’t a bonus ability, but a restriction. At times it’s very clever, and it’s probably the most unusual of them all, but just as often the solution comes down to a very fiddly matter of whether you were facing left or right at the time you did something.

The last of these levels has some real inconsistencies in the way certain objects behave when you’re rewinding – the game has two concepts of what ‘six seconds ago’ means, and it shows one of them while rewinding, then switches to the other when you stop.

I still suggest avoiding walkthroughs – these are just three puzzles among seveal hundred – but if you’re really stuck on something, it’s worth moving on and coming back to it. Even if it’s not one of these, it’s funny how thinking in a completely new way for the next level will usefully reorient your brain to go back and tackle the last.

Update: And yes, my favourite puzzle game ever is Portal. Partly because it doesn’t make mistakes like this.

I will say, though, that Braid has two advantages over Portal: each of the five worlds (and I think there may be a sixth I haven’t found yet) is profoundly unlike all the others, each as inventive in itself as Portal’s one mechanic. Portal’s length isn’t a reason for me to rank it below bigger but messier games like Deus Ex, but its scope is.

And Braid is genuinely tough. Fast and intuitive puzzling is great for telling a story, as Portal does expertly, but I wanted more head-scratching from its Advanced maps. They weren’t actually any harder than the later levels of the main game, and there’s no good reason they shouldn’t be.

Update: Just finished it.

Whoa.

Film Catch-Up

Despite being an English word in front of a Belgian placename, the title manages to make this sound like ponderous French arthouse cinema. Really, they should have called it: In Fockin Bruges? Wit You? Continued

Tweak Fortress

Not for the first time, a post I was writing – a sort of ideal TF2 patch notes – appeared on 1Blog before I could finish it. In fact, this time Chris even wrote a sequel before I was done with mine.

I agree with all the ideas Chris and his commenters propose. There are lots of small, uncontroversial improvements you could make to TF2, and I know Valve agree with at least a couple of the ones mentioned on 1Blog. The reason they haven’t been done yet is not that they’re potentially problematic, it’s just a question of time and priorities.

But I say these perfectly reasonable ideas don’t go too far enough! I got thinking seriously about my ideal patch notes when Valve admitted the Demoman is “a little out of whack”, then I finally got Kritzed under ideal circumstances, and later started to come up against more teams that field four or five Engineers on Defense.

This is an attempt to fix all the main things that bother me in TF2 with five changes. The last one’s just a good idea I stole from the Steam forums.

• Backburner: +50 health bonus removed.

  Update! They just did this!

  – Two sub-classes that look almost identical but have crucially different health values violates the clarity and immediacy that is the soul of TF2.

  – The Airblast ability is fun. You shouldn’t bribe players not to use it.

  – Pyros with this unlock automatically beat Pyros without it, even in a straight fight. That’s bad Unlockology.

• Sticky Bombs: Cannot be detonated until shortly after they affix to a surface. Neutralised if they take damage before arming.

  – The Sticky Launcher shouldn’t be an effective direct-combat weapon – it’s already superb for traps, jumps and defense.

  – The Demoman’s role shouldn’t overlap with the Soldier’s.

  – Engies should be able to defend their stuff from Stickies if they’re only coming in once every couple of seconds.

  – I hate that there’s no visual or audio indication of when you’re allowed to detonate a Sticky you just fired. They should light up and go bling! whether this change is made or not.

• Sentry: Will not attack a target if another Sentry is closer.

  – Most frustrating rounds result from impenetrable nests of three or more Sentries.

  – Sentry counter-tactics aren’t effective when other Sentries are covering the first.

  – Sentry clustering makes Engineers more viable the more of them there are.

  – Currently a computer-controlled class does more of the killing than most of the player-controlled ones.

  – This is silly.

Best shot ever, by Joe of Massive Crits, via Chris.

• Kritzkrieg: When activated, charge does not drain over time, but is instead drained by each shot the target fires.

  – Time-based charge drain encourages a rush mentality, which isn’t effective when the charge offers no protection.

  – It also penalises reloading classes, leaving only the same two who also make the best Ubercharge targets.

  – Currently an Ubercharge is more effective in almost every possible situation, and the 10% faster charge rate is insignificant.

• Heavy: No longer knocked back by Sentry fire.

  – The Heavy is unpopular despite being both powerful and fun, because he’s useless against Sentries at most ranges.

  – Even when Ubered.

• Wrench: Swinging with right mouse button will repair a Sentry, but never upgrade it.

  – Father_G on the Steam forums had this idea.

  – I like it.

Field Studies 4: Vu To A Thorough Game Demonstration

They’ve finally put together a trailer that explains the game, lightly blows the mind and is friendly to people who don’t yet know why they should care.

Will Wright also gave a typically smart, funny talk about what people have done with the Creature Creator so far, measuring their creativity in God Units with sacrilicious results.

Then Gamasutra interviewed Civ IV designer Soren Johnson, on his role trying to ensure Spore will satisfy the hardcore gamers. At length. It’s like one of my interviews before I have to cut 90% of it.

But most excitingly to those of us who already know everything it’s possible to know about the game, is a bunch of stuff we didn’t know about the game. Producer Thomas Vu falteringly reveals that Spore has eighteen different editors, including one for music.

The game footage is fantastic too. On his way to befriend a village of dinosaurs, he passes a tribe of big ugly black critters being terrorised by a single enormous Cthulhu in the background. Then the dinosaurs give him a ten! When Spore’s art style took a turn for the cutesy (a shift which Soren talks about in the Gamasutra interview), I don’t think my fears took into account the possibility that I might actually find it cute.

I’m now counting the days till I can play this properly, which happily, even the Grumblegut (above) could do on the fingers of one foot.

The Middleman

A few good ways to win me over, if you’re thinking of making a TV show with just me in mind:

– Female protagonist I don’t hate. Wendy Watson hereby joins the other… three.

– A character who doesn’t take half a fucking hour to get over every surprising turn of events. Writers! The stuff you’re writing didn’t really happen, so watching your characters refuse to believe it happened is not actually terribly entertaining for us!

– Conversely, disbelief at just how idiotic your plot is makes them highly entertaining.

– Max Payne references.

– Scenes where a character starts to say something about what we’re seeing, then thinks better of it.

– Ultra-mild curse words, ideally accompanied by a character who actually does swear her face off at the appropriate times. Somehow that makes the gosh-darnits seem extra mild.

– Ending an episode with a Russian Futurists song. This one was laser targeted at me.

What’s Happening In Kansas

For some reason your stupid country doesn’t let foreign superpowers like myself buy-in whoever we want to be State Representative in these ‘states’ of yours. But see if you can guess from their faces which one of these two candidates is evil.

Like everyone with a political agenda, I haven’t really looked into it and I know next to nothing about either candidate. But Sean Tevis’s XKCD homage makes a convincing case, and you don’t need to look into the other guy for long before you know he has to be stopped.

Tevis needs 3000 donations of $8.34 to out-finance the pink toad. No Kansas candidate has got more than 644 donors before, but he’s now on 2,894, so it’s not going to take much.

Update: He needed to get 3000 contributions in under two weeks – he got over 4,000 in two days. There’s now a short epilogue comic by way of thanks. Good job, the 1,107 Americans I apparently command.

Mirror’s Edge

I don’t often dribble about unreleased games here, except when they’re by Valve or a cool part of them has just been released or I’ve played them and can’t tell you anything useful. But I am in love with Mirror’s Edge.

The first trailer is a thing of wordless and tinglingly scored beauty. The DICE team have shown only hints of this artistic muscle before – both of the last Battlefield games were crisply depicted, but even 2142 only had a few properly striking scenes. Mirror’s Edge is fearlessly clear in its art direction, dazzingly stark and bleach-clean throughout. Like only the best oppressive dystopias, I want to live there.

It makes me laugh, and then feel sad, when people say that Gears of War 2 looks good. It looks like an ashtray.

GameTrailers did an uncharacteristically excellent recut of that first footage, halting to extrapolate the implications of every detail shown. I hope they eventually do the same for the new Leap of Faith footage (which isn’t the same as the stuff shown in the developer talkthrough).

Together, the three suggest an energetically tactile, flexible and powerful mode of movement. I love, love the notion of being able to cling onto something, then look freely around behind me and leap in the direction of my choice. It’s the antithesis of the hopelessly vague dictionary of airy, hands-free movement verbs we have access to in every other first-person game.

All three show combat in some form, and for the most part I really like the quick, linked series of light blows you can use to disarm or incapacitate people. But I don’t see how you get to them. In the demos, the player simply lets herself get shot to hell – they’ve got God mode on, so it has no effect, but it raises a pretty big question.

My answer to it, which they clearly haven’t gone for, would be a system of automatically triggered bullet-time. For the most part, you’re dashing around in real-time and bullets ping around you – your enemies should have Stormtrooper Aiming Syndrome, of course.

But whenever a bullet is fired that’s on track to hit you, extreme slow-mo is activated and a line of air-ripples shows the path the bullet is on. The more accurate the shot, and the closer the range, the further you’ve got to move your body in the shorter the space of time. Realtime resumes the second you’ve moved yourself out of danger.

It would be redundant to argue that the game would be better off without a plot; no-one could put that argument more eloquently or forcefully than the first trailer itself – especially in light of the groan-worthy second. Look at her:

She doesn’t have a sister. She’s too cool to be born.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

After proudly announcing a return to normal programming, I studiously wrote the first line of eight different posts and then watched Futurama until I passed out. I’ve been working for fifteen consecutive days at this point and I don’t sleep for long, so you might have to bear with me a bit.

This needs blogging about urgently, though, because it’s an online televisual event that will happen at an actual time! Tomorrow! Written by Joss Whedon and some other people, starring Nathan Fillion, Neil Patrick Harris and my close personal friend Felicia Day, it has two things in common with Firefly, and it’s about a supervillain, and it’s got Felicia Day, who is interviewed in the issue of PC Gamer on-sale in two weeks. Run, don’t walk, to your newsvendor. But run slow enough that you get there around the end of July.

It’s also a musical, and admittedly I haven’t liked one of those since Dancer In The Dark, but still. The three acts go up Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and stay up till Sunday, but I’m particularly keen on watching it as it comes out, because I am as mentioned in love with the idea of international premieres.

The premiere is something the internet’s sort of destroying and recreating at the same time: movies are splattered across the release schedule as people pirate them early, wait for the DVD, or wait to pirate the DVD. TV is Tivo’d and DVD sets are Netflixed bit by bit, but increasingly significant things are getting put out as webisodes. And in that, we’ve got the communal excitement of every fanatic devouring new content at the same time, world-wide instead of country-wide.

…

S’cool.

Update! Spit! This thing is the exact opposite of what I just said! It’s being broadcast via the evil Hulu, which is US-only. Way to defeat the whole spirit of the thing, jerk-wads!

Nevertheless, it is live now, and if you just grab Hotspot Shield or another sneaky proxy service of your choice, you can disguise yourself as an American and watch. Think of it as a baseball cap and a few extra pounds for your browser.

Update! It’s good! But doesn’t get very far in its 14 minutes. I now advise waiting till it’s all out on Saturday and watching then, since someone blew the whole worldwide premiere idea. Felicia suggests non-US people wait ‘a bit’, and adds a smiley face. Make of that what you will.

Update! As Iain and Graham note, the US-only restriction seems to have been removed.

Update! Act 2 is out and even better! Also, the whole thing is getting crazy popular, which is awesome. Provided they can refrain from fucking up the region thing, more of this sort of thing!

Update! It’s over! What did you think? Spoilerific comments below. I thought it went from good to great and back to good. The end seemed to be leveraging an emotional investment that I didn’t really have. I was there for the lols.