SteveThaiBinh

Just finished episode one of The Silver Lining. It was very short, but episode two is out tomorrow and that hopefully will be more substantial.

Better Off Ted is the funniest comedy I've seen on TV in ages. The BBC has a system of commissioning comedy writers to make radio series for Radio 4 - the series that are successful are then adapted for TV. The problem is that the radio originals are almost always much better than the TV versions. This was true for The League of Gentlemen, Little Britain, The Mighty Boosh etc.

Wals, I'd be interested to know your thoughts on the current state of defence procurement in the UK. I've been reading the blog of Conservative MP Douglas Carswell recently, and he's pretty damning about how our money is spent.

No, I'm not really saying that, because I don't have detailed knowledge of the subject. I think it's certainly in the character of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to pass government functions over to quangos on the grounds that they're impartial and at arm's length, and therefore so that if something goes wrong, the government can escape the blame. So the increase in quango spending is very dramatic, I agree, however the spending probably falls into at least four categories I can think of off-hand: 1. Functions that should be carried out by quangos and are necessary. (courts, research funding) 2. Functions that are necessary but should be transfered back to government control and accountability. (a number of education quangos fit this bill) 3. Functions that are not necessary and can simple be done away with. (potato marketing) 4. Waste/abuse (like the salaries of some quango heads, or 'training days' in luxury hotels) 3 and 4 get the headlines, but I suspect a lot of the spending is actually in 1 and 2. I'm sure there are economies to be had, and direct government accountability over more functions ought to increase efficiency and decrease waste, but I can't see where massive cuts will come from. Do you have a breakdown of where the growth in spending has been since 1995? That would be an interesting read.

Piers Morgan? Isn't he the former editor of the Mirror who got fired for those hoax photographs? I didn't even know he did TV.

I don't think you could just cut 75% of the budget of quangos. Of course, the amount of money spent by quangos depends on how you define a quango, and part of the problem is that our government is badly designed and messy, and a lot of public money has been wasted. Nevertheless, the spending figures for quangos tend to include things like the prison service, the courts, museums, the bodies that fund scientific research, and so on. Yes, there's a case that some of these bodies don't need the autonomy of quango status and could be brought back under direct government control and accountability, but I don't think there are huge savings there. There are some quangos that could quite easily be abolished and their function simple done away with, though.

I'm surprised Saudi Arabia scored as highly as it did.

I use tactical view sometimes, for very difficult battles. I hope they keep it or find something to replace it, and don't just make all the battles easier.

How long will that take to reach zero - 4 days?

Alan Parker- 6 Albatross- 16 Ali Shaheed- 5 Conrad Marburg- 9 (-1) For selling out. Grigori Pazinhov- 2 Henry Leland- 11 Hong Shi- 11 Konstantin Brayko- 14 Mina Tang- 8 Omen Deng- 18 Ronald Sung- 7 (+1) For being a politician and a decent human being SIE- 19 Scarlet Lake- 20 Sis- 20 Steven Heck- 20 Yancy Westridge- 3

Alpha Protocol is fantastic, it really is! I'm even willing to forgive the checkpoints, that's how good everything else is.

I agree. Britain is trying to avoid turning into Greece. Ideologically this government would be very happy to give tax breaks to a growing sector of industry, but the money's just not there right now.

Julia Gillard was born in Wales. I know this because the British news felt the need to tell me so every time the story was mentioned, and indeed it seemed to be the most important thing about her. I don't know that we ever found out anything else.

I haven't noticed any bugs either, and no crashes - which is great. I don't even have to disable my anti-virus, unlike some other highly-praised games.

Loved the music and the voice acting.

I like Virumor's video. USA look good to qualify.

I'm pleased to see the government has promised there'll be no knee-jerk changes to the gun laws, which are fine as they are. I hope they can keep this up and don't yield to a tabloid panic.

Please tone down the language a bit - it takes me ages to work out which swear words are behind all the asterisks.

There should be some developments on this very soon, I hope.

I'm going to merge this with the main reviews thread, to avoid duplication. Please continue the discussion.

We're here to discuss the game and its reviews - please remember that directly insulting another community member is against forum guidelines. I'm going to clean up some recent posts that I feel break this rule, and I hope we can keep the tone more constructive from now on.

I'm in the Middle East and getting the same screen. Hopefully it will unlock when North America does. Not living there or in Europe or Japan, we're a bit of an afterthought, but at least Steam doesn't automatically block us from buying games (like some other sites do).

I don't really mind that there are different release dates for different places. I just wish the Steam countdown wouldn't lie to me.

Manannan was a great adventure game villain. In a genre dominated by picking up random objects, here's a guy who kills you on the spot for picking up random objects. I would also mention Von Glower from GK2 and Katrina from QfG4 as memorable villains. And it is a disgrace that Kreia's not there.

You know, that reminded me that there's more to NWN2 than the main quest story - I thought about playing last week but didn't fancy it, but now I think I might go through Mysteries of Westgate again - I only ever finished that once, and not with an evil character. Thanks to gog.com, I'm playing though Gabriel Knight - finished 1 and 2, about a third of the way through 3. It's been a while since I played and the graphics on GK3 haven't aged well, even with high resolution settings. I did enjoy GK2 without having to swap all the disks around.