Maria Caliban

If they can turn comic books into good movies, they can turn games into good movies.

They haven't removed any feature. FF is tied to difficulty. Just like DA:O. Because there is apparently a fantasy writer named Joe Ambercrombie who featured in his work a character who was turned into a living weapon by magic tattoos he had. His name was, you guessed it, Fenris. Fenris the Feared. The eight-foot tall half-devil killing machine who was dug out of a mountain and resurrected by a witch. Superhumanly strong, invulnerable to pain, and has strange twitches. He's more Black Whirlwind than elf boy.

Friendly fire is tied to difficulty. I think only nightmare has it. You can't turn off auto-attack on the PC.

Yes. The closer to the release date, the worse it gets. The Mass Effect forums before ME 2 were especially bad. The DA 2 forums are quite civil and well behaved so far.

Is there an official game length/HD space-ratio that i should know about? Would you like me to make one for you?

?????? I misread.

Delayed for possibly an entire year. That's unfortunate. Unless the final product needs some major work, I can't understand why they'd do this.

I would hope for something longer than Jade Empire, however. Yes, there's a pause function.

HD space for DA:O: 20 GB HD space for ME 2: 15 GB HD space for Alpha Protocol: 12 GB HD space for Jade Empire: 8 GB HD space for DA 2: 7 GB Wow. Given that the PC is fully voiced, this will likely be BioWare's shortest game.

I reinstalled Civilization V because of the various updates they've put out. Hopefully, I'll enjoy the game a bit more.

German preview. Embargo ends on the 20th.

I wonder what paragon/renegade will mean in ME3? It seems to change a bit each time.

Whenever I see pictures of Lucian's game collection I think, "I like that blanket. Is that fleece? It looks very warm and comfy. The colors and thick stripes are also very reassuring. His bed spread is nice as well, but what's with the white walls?"

As an aside, I have complete faith that Dragon Age 2 will be an excellent game that I love to play. I will also enjoy the story and companions. Actually, I expect several games in 2011 to be good.

I am inclined to agree that Mass Effect 2 was superior to the original. I can understand arguing that it was a worse RPG, but not that it was a worse game.

Might be nice.

Why do you play games if you've never had an emotional response to one?

I'd like to thank the members of the Academy for this award, my mother, and everyone on the internet who has ever offered up a wrong opinon - you know who you are.

The real reason Jenson can only be male: A woman would just a vibrate function to her fingers and never leave the house again. I don't follow. It could be worse. That doesn't mean it's good. It could be better. That doesn't mean it's bad. We have to have some baseline expectation. If I live in a world where significant damage to my arm means losing it, then getting a cybernetic replacement that is as functional and responsive as my original arm should not provoke anguish. I'm not saying he has to be happy about it. There's a large emotional spectrum to work with here.

That's fair. The average person who considers themselves a gamer and avoids casual games like solitare is probably younger.

I don't think that's retrograde. Technology does not always get smaller as it progresses. My current monitor is about an inch thick. Ten years ago, my cat could curl up on it when she wanted a warm place to sleep. Fifteen years before that, my mother owned a Mac that could have fit inside that monitor. Before I was born, she worked at a technology company where the computer filled a small room. Home fridges are almost a century old. Give graphics cards that much time, and they'll probably be smaller. Tangent: Fridges are also an odd example as they come in a wide range of sizes. They're meant to store stuff and their size is based on how much stuff you expect to store. Birth control probably had a bigger impact on the size of the average fridge than cooling technology did. Can you provide a source for that? It conflicts with what The Entertainment Software Association says: "The average game player is 34 years old and has been playing games for 12 years." According to Nielson's 2008 The State of the Video Gamer: "Females 25 years of age and older make up the largest block of PC game players accounting for 46.2 percent of all players and 54.6 percent of all game play minutes in December 2008."

You can see a great deal of WoW influence in Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2. This is a good thing. The coloring for Diablo 1 was mostly dull greys and browns with splashes of color provided by strange colored monsters. World of Warcraft works very hard to create interesting, well-defined environments. If you set someone down in the middle of a zone, they'll quickly be able to tell which one it is by looking around. This is much harder than you'd imagine. That said, I expect that the gameplay will be an excellent hack-and-slash fest where I spend hours chasing loot and slaughtering things like the drooling Pavlovian gamer Blizzard seems adept at molding.

You were being optimistic?

I loved Morrowind and was bored mindless by Oblivion. Wonder what Skyrim will be.

It would be great to see this. It won't happen, of course. Shepard will miraculously save all of humanity. Human centric space opera sucks.