I got Whitney the first series of Jonathan Creek as an extra gift for her birthday in the middle of the week - I knew she hadn't ever seen it before, but I went for it based on her liking of crime/mystery type programmes, and the way that I think the British ones are rather better (though let's be honest, this is not an opinion limited to those). Just now she's watching the very last episode of the last series, having downloaded and gone through the entire run of 25 episodes (or one American series) over the last four days. So I think I consider it something of a success.

I was aware of the premise of the programme and had seen a couple of episodes before, knowing that it was about the lovable curly-haired twit Alan Davies being a magician's stage designer who was roped into solving unsolvable crimes, but I hadn't realized that another attraction of it was that it seems to be the televisual equivalent of Avantasia (ignoring the way that 90 of 92 people on my friends list won't understand the reference) - it seems to have included at various points just about everyone who appeared on British TV at the time, including most of Bill Bailey's lot and several Doctor Whos.

Meanwhile, quadralien got me to give Team Fortress 2's free weekend a go. Normally I'm not a fan of team-based first person shooter games because I always thought Wolf ET was phenomenally dull at university, but after getting used to the distinction of the game from the other ones I'd played, I began to appreciate it. What I found most different about it was that the game didn't consist of multiple people with egos several times bigger than their own heads shouting at each other for their lack of complete efficiency - I think this might be something to do with the look the game's been given, more cartoonish than most in the genre I've seen, which somehow makes it feel more... fun. I've been trying to think of what it reminds me of, and I think it's Worms, for the way that it keeps track of special achievements as well as awards points based on more than just reducing someone else's health to 0. I think my favourite one so far is the one called "Rasputin", which is awarded for taking damage through being shot, burned, falling and blown up in the same lifespan.

I played it only a couple of times over the free period, and I'm not sure whether to stump up the $20 to continue afterwards, but I enjoyed the little I played of it. The last online game I played to any great extent was Unreal Tournament, which I liked because of the similar visibility it gave you to other players when you were doing well, broadcasting your name to everyone when you picked up a flag or got streaks of five or more. And I tended to avoid UT's team modes because you tended to be locked in to one game type on each server, but in TF2, maps with completely different objectives and game styles are freely rotatable, so it feels much more varied.

I know I have something of a Strong Bad mentality as to what's new to me, but I think the part that most impressed me was Steam itself. When I first started playing online games with Quake, it had to rely on external game-searching programs for you to be able to join games on servers that you didn't directly know the address of. UT was the first big leap I saw from this, with a server search in-game along with a chat feature to communicate with people. But with this, you can look up people you know, add them as friends, see which games they're in and connect to them directly as well as invite them to your own. It really is quite amazing, for someone who hasn't played a PC game since 2005.