SteveThaiBinh

Very impressive. I wish I could see the whole debate, without the edits - I wonder how her views were received. I'm pleased that Al-Jazeera, depicted by some as al-Qaeda's mouthpiece, would give her a chance to air her views in some detail.

I'm happy to keep it to ten for the moment - I mentioned that I seemed to be setting it up for the next player as a comment, not as a complaint. I find it very stress-free to have only ten turns, because I know I can't screw the game up so much that the next player can't undo it. :D

I have way too much free time at the moment. If I didn't have BG2, I think I'd go crazy. I read on the forum that you could romance in BG2 and it was too tempting to resist. 21 seconds.

So does Jade Empire have any Dragon's Age or Mass Effect easter eggs?

You mean you think the whole thing is a satire? Maybe, but take a look at the rest of the content on sounddoctrine.com. If it's a fake, it's an unusually good one. If the Jack Chick site can be real, there's no reason why this couldn't be. There are people in the world who really believe these things.

This set of 10 turns was mostly preparation for the next guy. :D 780BC: Our finances sadly ran out, and I reduced research spending to 90% just before we hit rock bottom. I've also set St. Petersburg to build a settler. We are the most cultured civ in the world! :cool: 680BC: Our worker at Moscow is finished - Moscow is quite well developed, so I've sent him to work on Novgorod, where there are now two workers. 620BC: My final turn, and the next player will have two settlers to play with. I strongly recommend the green dot for the first settler available, as I'm sure Hatshepsut has her eyes on those ivory. :ph34r: There's an archer unit on the road who I was planning to send to green dot ahead of the settler. For the second city, there's a pair of wine resources SE of Novgorod that might be worth claiming, but other credible locations too.

Wow, so few takers. No matter, maybe it'll pick up later in the week. I'll go next.

Yes and no.

I get it now. You click where you want the paddle to go, and the blue splodges show where you, and everyone else, is clicking, and I guess the paddle moves to a point that's an average of all the clicks. I thought the splodges were just decoration at first, and was trying to move the paddle with the keyboard. :"> Fun game. I'd still rather have a go on the democratic bus.

Moderately Multiplayer? Modestly Multiplayer? How am I supposed to be controlling the paddle?

with a close second. Story and characters are what do it for me; I don't like adventures that are too puzzle-focused or RPGs that are too combat heavy. I'm optimistic that Fahrenheit will lead to interesting things in the adventure genre. I like plenty of games from outside these genres, too - makes sense to keep an open mind.

I don't have a discerning spirit.

It seems to me the article is making a big fuss over how the computer answers the question without 'running' because the photon doesn't enter it, but actually all that's happening is the question is being inputted by different means, by 'quantum flirtation' rather than the photon. The scientist says the computer has not run, but in fact it has both run and not run, and it's therefore less surprising that it should have produced an answer (as well as not produced an answer, which presumably you wouldn't notice so much).

What does this actually mean?

Wouldn't a gold dragon just melt itself?

Yes and no: he makes some good points, though I don't agree with a lot of them. There's a serious and interesting topic here of what we learn from playing games, both good and bad, that deserves a nuanced analysis. Too often it gets drowned out by insane Thompsonian cries of 'GTA makes murderers!'. Learning (as opposed to formal education) is fun - are the best games fun because they are catching an aspect of learning that we don't fully understand yet?

Well, he makes a few interesting points, and I'm glad that he's thinking about what ideas and behaviours are reinforced by games, but I don't think he's going very deep. Winning is very often not a pure meritocracy, for example. It's interesting that he's so concerned that games should reinforce individualism and meritocracy, concepts that are valued, almost fetishized, by the Anglo-Saxon West. Other cultures value them too, but not to the exclusion of all else, and I think it's good that WoW apparently reflects this. Not that I've ever played it or ever will - it's one of these expensive on-line thingies, I believe.

I've really been looking forward to this . Galciv1 was an excellent game, and the developers really work hard on patches and improvements, so no worries that the game won't play well.

Vampire horsies suck!

No, it's still going as far as I know. Soulseeker and I are the last two to take a turn, so basically anyone else can jump in now.

Good job. I'm still hopeful we can get that spot to the west of Moscow for a city next, but who knows what the Egyptians will do? There's plenty of room to expand eastward, though. Our cows will indeed reign supreme. (Though as the founders of Hinduism, we really ought to get a happiness rather than a food bonus for controlling cows. )

So many people have already said that this game sucks, despite its not being released or finished at the time. We should have a prize for the first person to post 'Oblivion sucks' with a picture of themselves holding the actual game box. Probably at 12.01am on March 20.

I'm looking forward to playing this. I'm a little worried about the system requirements, so I hope they've put a lot of effort into making it stable and fun on less spectacular systems.

In the patch, the off-side rule was downgraded to bug status and removed.

The main theme, which I take to be track 1 from the DirectSong site, is fantastic background when you reach the top of a hill as the sun is rising and look down over a newly-discovered valley full of possibilities. The soundtrack did get a little repetitive, but that's always going to happen with an epic game, I suppose.