By Pentadact

I had to visit the US Embassy in London today, to renew the Visa I need to go on press trips. They won’t let you take any electronics in there, and they won’t hold them for you either – not without ’severe delays’ and a chance they’ll cancel your appointment, which costs $121.

So when I was heading out before dawn this morning, I put down my phone, picked up my MP3 player and left. Then I realised I was forgetting my phone and grabbed my phone, then I realised I couldn’t take my MP3 player and put back my MP3 player, then I realised I couldn’t take my phone and put back my phone, then my phone rang and I picked up my phone, put it down, picked it up, hung up, put it down and left.

I shut the door, locked the door, then armed my alarm with the electronic remote control that looks like nothing so much as a detonator.

I disarmed the alarm, unlocked the door, opened the door, armed the alarm, threw the remote indoors, shut the door, locked the door and left.

This was to be the beginning.

At the station, rummaging through my bag to make sure I had the nine bits of paper I’d need, I found the USB stick I keep in there. It’s a decent-sized one, and probably contains some personal stuff, so I wasn’t immediately sure what do to with it. I had ten minutes, and the office is five minutes from the station, so I decided I’d drop it off at work.

Five minutes later, I found the office wasn’t open yet.

I wasn’t ready to throw this thing away, but it wasn’t life-changingly vital. I thought for a second, then put it in the flowerbed outside the Future offices. Then, realising it looked like rain, grabbed a nearby paper cup to give it some shelter.

It was great. It was like a dead drop, but for myself, of incriminating evidence, only not incriminating or evidence, and with a paper cup hat. Real Spycatcher stuff.

I made my train, sat down and relaxed: electronics-free and above suspicion. It was around then that I started to look at the non-electronic items I had with me through US Embassy eyes. Amongst some discs and documents with words like ‘Assassin’ on them, I had:

• A notepad containing detailed ideas for experimental nuclear payload delivery systems.
• A satellite image of the US Embassy.
• A stick-on Hitler moustache.

These were for a Supreme Commander blog post, navigation and from a Richard Herring gig last week, but I worried this might not be obvious from their presence on my person. Still, I couldn’t really ditch them: I wanted everything except the satellite image, and there were no bins anywhere near the station or embassy for security reasons.

When I finally got in, this was my interview:

“Who do you work for?”
“Future Publishing.”
“Any particular magazine?”
“PC Gamer.”
“And how long have you worked there?”
“Just over five years.”
“Your application has been approved.”

The issue of PC Gamer out today – which I’m pleased to report you can now buy anywhere in the world with cheap or free postage – has a six page feature about Spelunky in it, by me.

It’s something I’ve wanted to do for months: the game possessed me, and no matter how many pieces I read on it I’m never happy that its appeal has been conveyed. I always feel if I’d read this stuff without playing the game, I’d have no inkling of the hilarious, ridiculous and terrifying situations it gets you into on a regular basis. My stab at this, as usual, was to just write some of them down.

Thanks to Deputy Art Ed Amie Causton and Spelunky’s level editor, we put together one of my favourite opening spreads:

It’s spliced with some great quotes creator Derek Yu gave me when I interviewed him, as well as the story of my obsessive search for Spelunky’s deepest secret: the lost City of Gold. It took me over a thousand attempts to find it, and stepping into that low-res treasure trove is one of the most spine-tingling moments of my gaming life. The opening to this feature is what I wrote about it minutes later.

It doesn’t feature a robot apocalypse, though. That’s in a report Rich and I did about a match of Supreme Commander 2:

It ends in with a bizarre twist that took us both by surprise, one I’ve never even heard of happening in this type of match before.

The other thing I want to highlight here is that Chris Livingston, who once blogged about what it’s like to play Oblivion as an ordinary citizen, writes a great mini spin-off to that in our Now Playing section this issue. In it, he attempts to be completely law-abiding in Grand Theft Auto IV. I am not prepared to confirm at this time whether or not hijinks ensue.

More on the issue here.

This is a thing I do now. Most of this stuff I mentioned on Twitter, but it’s not an ideal channel and I don’t like that I never link stuff here anymore.

Craig Mullins’ extraordinary BioShock 2 tribute art: ‘1959′. The first image in years to immediately become my desktop background at home and at work. I love that he can make such a concealed place feel spacious and calm, and it makes me want a game where we see Rapture in its glory – even if it has to be without the people. He’s a concept artist who’s worked on Halo, Fallout 3 and one of the Matrix films.

Hard On, by Withered Hand. The name would have put me off, but this came up on shuffle when I was going through Said The Gramaphone’s songs of the year. I love the friendly advice tone of the lyrics.

Amazon customer reviews of a steering-wheel mounted laptop desk: everyone’s a comedian, most of them pretty good ones.

Man earns every World of Warcraft achievement: I won’t link it, but this was one of those strange stories where the only thing about the story isn’t true, and the people reporting the story all know it isn’t true. If it were mainstream sources, you’d assume it was ignorance. If it were the guy himself, you’d assume it was mendacity. When it’s disinterested parties who know their stuff, you can only imagine its borne of some kind of news desperation. It’s okay, guys, there’s plenty of news out there that actually did happen! You could report that! Long story short, he hadn’t got every achievement: a bug caused his total to be reported one higher than it is. The story therefore becomes: …

The Onion named Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind their film of the decade. An interesting choice – it would have been easy to go with There Will Be Blood without really thinking about it. They also make a good case for their equally surprising #2, another film I love. My list would be Memento, Serenity, Adaptation.

Just Cause 2 Vehicle Stunts Trailer: on top of everything else, I’m really excited by how good Just Cause 2 feels – the first game was only really fluid when you were parachuting. Here vehicles seem to have that same smoothness and momentum. Watch for the awesome jump at 2m52s.

Just Cause 2 Island In Chaos Trailer: Worth it for what he does after the end titles.

Jonty explains the London Underground’s mysterious Inspector Sands. I love codes.

Star Trek Online gives you ridiculously good in-game stuff for pre-ordering at various places. The worst use of game content and development time – as bribes to take sides in the puerile retail wars. Got me so annoyed I started an argument about it, which’ll be in the next issue of PC Gamer.

IGN’s Rogue Warrior review: “the hit detection is extremely hit or miss”.

A Claptrap in a tux. I just like this shot. I still haven’t played any of the Borderlands DLC.

Andy Dufresne is tweeting the Shawshank Redemption in first person, in order. “Oh dear God.” is a common update.

There really is a gnome of Noam Chomsky. Sad news via @icouldbeahero.

LightBox’s Trent Polack finds there’s a thread on the Avatar forums to help fans cope with the depression of returning to the real world after the awesomeness of the movie.

Cute but dark short by a Pixar animator, via Waxy.

roBurky notes that Calvin and Hobbes did the ‘where’s the future?’ joke everyone’s been driving into the ground back in 1989. As an eight year old, I don’t think I was actually tired of it then.

@ex0’s stupendous Captain Forever ship: like a flying cathedral made of rainbows and pain.

Facebook is now the size of the entire internet ten years ago. The average Facebook user spends 55 minutes on it a day.

Woke up confused on Thursday morning, after a night spent talking to a dog with a human head, dodging feathers thrown by a woman on a rocking horse in the rafters, avoiding a man with a fox snout moulded onto his mouth, exchanging glances with a badger couple, and applauding a woman who set her nipples on fire with a candle lit by an electrified cucumber – the Future Christmas party. The text from Craig that woke me up said the new Team Fortress 2 update namechecked me. !?

The office is nuts at the moment because we’re just finishing the shortest issue cycle of the year, so we were already exhausted when we headed up to Reading for Play with PC Gamer Live: our big free LAN party. Met a lot of names I knew from comments here, as well as Twitter and the PCG blog.

The event was partly to launch our PC Gamer Top 100 site. We’ve done our Top 100 article in the new issue, now we’re gathering votes for a gigantic public one. In the mag, Deus Ex has won for the first time ever – it’d be awesome to see it win the public vote as well. Vote!

One of the main games we played there was Team Fortress 2, so Craig got in touch with Valve beforehand to see if they could lend us some cheaty weapons to hurt our readers with during the event. To their enormous credit, despite being days away from launching a major update, they did. We were able to turn ourselves into slow but nigh-invincible Medics with eternally critting bonesaws, Scout-speed Heavies with deadly boxing gloves, and Soldiers with rapid-fire rocket launchers that do one hundred times the normal damage and heal us with every hit.

The next day the update was out, and I was determined to play fair. But then Robin, who sorted these ultra-weapons out for us, showed up in one of my matches and challenged me to a ridiculous weapon duel. I’d already seen him use the rocket launcher he loaned us, so I was picturing a jousting match with that when I agreed. I hadn’t considered what Valve’s personal versions of the new Demoman weapons might be.

Powerful and on fire I can deal with, but invincible makes things tricky. It meant the match was primarily about stopping him from getting to me, which meant buffeting him with streams of rockets as he charged. Inevitably he’d get too close, and I’d have to rocket-jump away and spray a salvo down on the map as I flew.

I apologise to the many, many people killed in the crossfire, and also the people I just shot. Not everyone in the game knew who Robin worked for or guessed that my weapons were probably his doing, so some names were slung. Sorry dudes!

For those that asked, I’m afraid I don’t have my ’special’ pickaxe to show you yet – looks like there are still some teething problems with this update that ought to be ironed out first. I think it’ll be a regular pickaxe with a subtle sparkle to it and eventually a custom name, rather than a cheat-o-matic megapick. I still plan to use it to the exclusion of all else.

The rest of the week was consumed by stuff you don’t care about, but it’s been awesome and exhausting in equal measure. I think we might finally be approaching the relaxing part of Christmas, so today I do nothing that doesn’t have ‘Fortress’, ‘Commander’ or ‘Trek’ in the title.