SteveThaiBinh

It's a beta, so you need to follow the link from the forum page and download it separately. I hope the official version fixes the repeating bug in the Tavorick manor. That's by far the most serious bug I've found so far, and I think it was created in one of the earlier patches, even.

Perhaps with the experience Bethesda got from attempting (and largely failing) to make Radiant AI work for Oblivion, they can improve the system for Fallout 3 and make it into something worthwhile. Radiant AI has potential, surely? Now they know the kind of anomalies it throws up, they can either decide to tone it down again or they can build the whole game world in such a robust way that it allows the AI to run amok without breaking the game. That would be fun.

I don't think anyone would want it to attempt to continue the storyline of the same characters from BG2, although a few brief NPC cameo appearances would be nice. I'd like it to be the spiritual successor to the Baldur's Gate games - with an interesting story, emphasis on dialogue and interesting NPCs, and an epic feel. As hilarious as the faux developer avatars are for all of three seconds, wouldn't newcomers to the forum be surprised to see developers making such contributions to discussions as those above?

This is Baldur's Gate 3 by another name, right? If so, excellent!

Even in the extremely unlikely event that more troops in Iraq resulted in an improvement in the security situation in Iraq, that would lead to the many the foreign insurgents in Iraq returning to their home countries in Eqypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and going back to bombing and destabilizing there. It's common to hear ex-pats here in Saudi Arabia say that the longer Iraq stays a mess, the safer we are.

The best thing about cricket is listening to Test Match Special on BBC radio. It is the most wonderfully cosy, comfortable, funny and reassuring sound for an Englishman abroad. Sadly, I didn't get to hear any this time as the cricket was on through the night.

I doubt I'll buy it, especially if it's just more of the same. Oblivion itself was quite enough of the same if you found the same satisfying. It would be great to let someone capable of telling a decent story loose with the Oblivion engine to produce an expansion pack, but is that really going to happen any time soon?

Alanschu, I find the ending of Serpent Isle really memorable too, both for the loss of Dupre and for the big scary red hand. That was in the days when we accepted cliffhanger endings because we had confidence that a sequel would be made if the company said so. Even so, I think it was overshadowed by the scene with Batlin at the Wall of Lights. It wasn't precisely the ending, because it occurs one puzzle before the end of the game, but the Gabriel Knight 2 opera is still the best cut scene I've ever seen in a video game. I liked the ending of GK3 as well, sad but fitting, and very true to the characters. A lot of games have endings that are a bit of a let down, but I can't think of many that are truly awful. The ending of Quest for Glory V was a bit limp, and didn't do justice to the epic five-game journey you'd just been on. The celebration at the end of QfG2 was much better. I'm afraid that Kotor 2 is the second worst I can think of right now, and only made worse by the fact that the rest of the game was really very good. Maybe the restoration project can erase the horrible memories... The worst ever is Syberia II. At least Syberia 1's ending was redeemed by the very good game before it. Syberia II just left me sad at how pointless and emotionally empty the whole experience had been. I doubt Kate Walker felt much better.

Poor Grobnar. I think he's quite funny, in small doses, and his humming isn't bad. It would have been an easy decision on the part of the voice director to get the actor to reinterpret the character, but I'm glad they left it the way it was. I thought most of the voices in the game were really good. It's only the guards at the manor - "There's an ill wind tonight, Weatherley..." that made me cringe.

England is still the second best test cricket side in the world, or something like that. It only goes to show how far ahead the Australians are, although a number of their best players are retiring after this series.

To people in many countries in Asia, this is a symbol that's on all their temples, modern and ancient. Any association with nazism is probably little more than a historical footnote to them, if they're even aware of it at all. It's primarily a symbol of their religion. You might say that banning it here is like British Airways banning that woman from wearing a Christian cross because it might offend non-Christians.

Sure. It's pretty.

It's hard to predict how people in general will react. I wonder if growing the foetus outside wholly outside the mother will ever be seen as desirable by most, even when it becomes possible. That hasn't happened with cloning, after all. But for many with strong religious views, it would still be replacing something abhorrent (the killing of the unborn foetus), with something that was merely undesirable (the raising of more children without their mothers). You're probably right. Imagine if we had this option today - the thousands of unwanted children left for the state to raise, and I don't think the state has a particularly good record of turning out productive and well-adjusted adults from its care systems. The economic cost of not killing these foetuses could be huge. So could the cost to ourselves and our society of killing all these foetuses when we don't have the 'pro-choice' justification of respecting the mother's rights any more.

In my culture, the majority view has been that while abortion isn't desirable, it's acceptable up until the foetus is a certain age (in law, 28 weeks) if there's a threat to the mother's health. Generally, the trauma of being forced to carry an unwanted foetus is held to be sufficient threat to her health that we have in effect abortion on demand. Later than that, it's acceptable if there's a danger to the mother's life, but not otherwise. This is probably because the aborted foetus seems too close to a viable baby in the popular imagination, and such late abortions would seem to cheapen the value of the life of a child. This hasn't always been what's considered right. As a moral relativist, I'm comfortable with the idea that values change over time as human experience grows. Recently, there were pictures showing the foetus at younger than 28 weeks looking much more 'human', shall we say, than many people expected. There was some discussion about whether the law needed to be changed, though nothing has happened so far. People are worried about stirring up these issues - we look across the Atlantic at how issues such as gay marriage and abortion seem to distort US politics, and we're wary of opening up a similar can of worms here. Nevertheless, a change may come. Technology is also affecting our views on the morality of abortion, as babies born earlier survive much more succesfully than they used to. It may be that sometime in the future, a foetus can be removed from the mother at any stage following conception, and grown in a machine until it reaches the age of birth and beyond. At that time, I think abortions that kill the foetus will come to be seen as wrong in all circumstances, allowing pro-lifers and pro-choicers to unite behind the same position and finally get past this and onto the next thing.

Hairballs are no laughing matter.

Okay. Feel free to add things to either list and take issue with any that are wrong. I haven't debated all of this for a while now, as it's not something you can really discuss openly living where I do... On the negative side: It's led to chaos in many parts of Iraq. It's provided an arena where Islamist terrorists can gain combat experience which they will later take back to destabilize their home countries. There have been thousands of casualties, civilian and coalition. It hasn't made the US safer. It's cost a huge amount of money for little or no gain, security or otherwise. It's cost the US its position as leader of the free world. It's cost the leaders of the US and UK the respect and trust of many of their people. It's convinced many Muslims that the US is engaged in a war on their religion. It's helped terrorists persuade moderate muslims to radicalize. It's weakened the position of Arab governments who are allies of the US, and have had to deal with a backlash from their own people. It's made the US look weak when there are other threats that may need to be faced, such as Iran and North Korea. It exposed US intelligence as incompetent. It's distracted attention away from solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and dealing with global terrorism. It looks like a failure, whether or not you think it actually is one, and that makes the US look weak. It led to Abu Graib, and the world image of the US army as torturers, an image they will be decades trying to lose. On the other hand: It's removed from power a dictator who deserved to be removed. It's saved the lives of those he would have harmed. It's freed the Iraqi people from tyranny (although then immediately plunging them into chaos). It's removed from power a leader who openly wanted to acquire weapons of mass destruction (but who was effectively being prevented from doing so). On balance, I think I'd have to call that a failure. The only way to call it a success is to define the aims in very narrow terms, and ignore all the unintended consequences. Edit: I'm assuming you meant the Iraq War, not the Viet Nam War. Plus this is getting a bit off-topic, as this thread has more to do with whether the war was right, rather than whether it was successful.

Yes, for the next ten or twenty years or so. By the end of that time, they'll have recovered their confidence, rewritten history so that Iraq was someone else's fault and wasn't a failure anyway, and be ready to give it all another go. I think that of the many people who are now saying the war was a mistake, not all are saying it was unjust as well, and I don't think they really need to. The anti-war camp was always a mixed bag, with some people objecting to the war because it was illegal or unjust, and others who thought it was 'just', but who foresaw the mess that we now have and believed it would make security worse.

Their new weapon of choice is gas. Does this guy have much of a chance in court? Surely he'd actually have to be ordered to do something that amounted to a war-crime before he could refuse legally.

Bushisms. Do you know any good sites? It's a while since I looked for them, and there must be a few new ones by now. Here's a quote that I only saw recently, but definitely a favourite: "Far more beguiling to me than the idea that evil can be destroyed by throwing a piece of expensive costume jewellery into a volcano is the possibility that peace between nations can be maintained by careful diplomacy." (Terry Pratchett)

B. If we're in the casino and the guards aren't, surely we control all the money, drugs and whatever. More than enough to bribe the chief, right? I'm not saying the hooker disguises won't work, I'm just saying it's good to have a Plan B.

Torchwood, maybe. Doctor Who might work as an adventure game, either traditional or with new Fahrenheit-style elements. They could do a Sam & Max with it and release episodes for download. Can you imagine giving the Doctor stats? That's the stuff of flamewars.

So now we have Stargate Worlds MMORPG and Battlestar Galactica MMORPG. I appreciate that the form is very popular at the moment, but haven't they heard of putting all your eggs in one basket? Next they'll be announcing a Doctor Who MMORPG.

Is it possible that the proprietor is wearing the Dungaro Belt of Strength? Oh, and I choose A, and I predict that it's going to turn out really really well.

As has been noted, he says "You have left me an opening". He says it a lot. It's really quite annoying. Still not as annoying as G0-T0, though. If the Restoration Project features either of these two blowing up, I shall be the happiest man alive.

*Heads over to Wikipedia* Ooh, that looks interesting. Interesting characters, involving storyline, criticised by reviewers as slow-paced - these are all ticks in my book. Does Shenmue 2 have an unsatisfying, Kotor2-style 'cliffhanger' ending, or is it reasonably satisfying while leaving some unanswered questions for game three? What's a SEGA Dreamcast?