Calax

I don't know exactly how the EU works, but it seems like, if they ever wanted a prayer of working, they needed to be able to control all the economies and have the same economic laws and powers in every member state. Which would be that Euro superstate. The reason they're in trouble now is because the money is only as strong as the weakest link... Greece.

Either way Britan only KIND OF accepted the EU. After all, they still have the Pound as one of their primary forms of currency even though they're technically supposed to be on the Euro.

Well, in the beta they had a few designated days for customer service, and they even asked for a stress test that fell apart. I get the feeling they're underestimating just how hard the servers are gonna be SLAMMED

FORK YOU TOOO RANDOM PERSON FROM ANOTHER SCHOOL! We beat Oklahoma we can beat you.

Well... apparently I could make it up. Because it's finals week my professor is forcing people to turn in their exams in general, which she usually doesn't do, so showing up late wouldn't be an issue. Feel pretty good about the exam actually.

Screwed up badly with my alarm going of at 9 am... on a clock that was set an hour late (so it went off at 10) My final was at 9:45 and I can't really make it up under any circumstances.

I'm just wondering if Putin's "BONE MORE!" campaign will continue.

So... I picked up Homefront, and imo it was worth the 7.50 I got it for. BUT I figured since I'm digging through all this in my head I might as well lay it out in a semi-review format. So, for those who don't know, Homefront is a game that had a huge selling point of "Written by the guy who did Red Dawn". Personally I haven't seen Red Dawn, but the entire game feels like a relic of the Cold War era. America has been Conquered by the Reds (Koreans in this case... was originally the chinese but politics interefered), and is now acting as an occupied country. The game itself takes place two years after the Reds take over, and it looks like the entire place had been invaded... and then just ignored. Buildings are falling apart, NOTHING is clean, and the entire aesthetic would look more at home in a post-apoc game/movie. The protagonist in the game is entirely forgettable, never saying a word and only having one defining characteristic (he's a pilot). He's picked up at the start of the game because the Koreans are rounding up all the pilots (it's not explained very well), and put on a bus to a labor camp (which gives the devs a chance to show off "THESE GUYS ARE EVIL!" scenes like a mother and father telling their toddler "Don't look" before they're executed... random beatings...). Then you meet the rebels when they RAM THE BUS WITH A SEMI to "Rescue" you, and you start off on your adventures to find and steal some fuel to give to military hold outs on the other side of the rockies. I have three BIG gripes with this game. 1) The characters. Ok, I understand this is a shooter, and thus your chances for interactions are limited. I get that, I really do... but the characters in this come off as one note characters who have little to no personality. The one you spend the most time with (Conner) is the de-facto leader of the troupe, and I HATE him. Mainly because he's a revenge freak who does absolutely everything to kill every last korean on the planet. He's the one who rescues you with a Semi, then he leads you and your persuers into a semi-friendly neighborhood stating "Well, they're with us or against us!" and when people yell at him about putting the civs in danger he just says "they're in danger anyway" and trundles along. Basically, if you want something screwed up, put this guy in charge. The other characters are fairly one note, and don't say that much. You've got the black law man (who gets shot first and eliminated from the plot for the most part), the chick who's a battle-humanitarian, and the asian tech guy. These are stock characters that are SO stock you could put them in any situation and they'd still create a sitcom. 2) The Pacing (and a few related design elements) The game is the fairly standard "relatively linear areas with giant setpiece battles at the end where **** explodes"... except not. Often you're told to follow characters around, but your basic RUN is faster than them, so you're standing at the door waiting for them to catch up and then say their line and open it. I'm not even kidding when I say that if you reach a door, you HAVE to wait for every NPC to get to the door, then go through the door, before you can move on through yourself. Same thing happens when you go up a ladder, or utilize any sort of map switching. It just ends up bogging the entire thing down so that you're spending more time bonking into a door than you do actually shooting somebody. The reason this worked in COD4 and it's clones, is because the NPC's you were following were just a WEE bit faster than you, so you always knew where you were going. AND they weren't required to dig through every corner of the map. It felt natural to be part of an SAS squad standing by the door while your boss popped it open and checked for tangos, here it's usually "wait at the door then somebody smacks it and it opens wide". 3) The Imagery Ok, the guy who wrote this had an agenda. He stated he wanted to add in a social message about the ills of America and try to get people to be called to arms. But it's sort of like those movies where it's all style and symbols... but no substance. As I mentioned before, the Koreans are portrayed as mustache twirling thugs who just kill because they can. It gets so over the top in how it DESPERATELY wants to get a reaction from you that it gets perversely silly. In the intro alone you drive and within 100 feet you see a population round up, a couple being split up, a beating, and an execution (in front of the kid who'll become batman in 10 years). I'm serious, you see this literally within 100 feet of each other as your prison bus drives down the road. What's worse, is that they never ACTUALLY feel threatening in any way. You slaughter them by the dozen before you're even done with the intro and you never saw them actually defeat anyone. So they come off more like the school bully, strong when in a position of power, but when ordered to throw down, fails catagorically. Even a tank and Helicopter don't feel that hard because you get a robotic death god to command. Anyway, back to the imagery, This game is trying to shock you. It's trying to make something stir inside you and even gives you examples of how you should act. You come across the Koreans creating a mass grave for those killed in their labor camps, and see a bulldozer dumping bodies into it... and INSTANTLY Conner flies into a rage and starts shooting at a numerically superior force, and gives away their location (in theory it was a stealth mission). It's the same thing any time you come across something that is supposed to shock you, one of the characters will go "Oh mah gawd!" and flip out in some way. Let the scene speak for itself, let the image speak for itself... and for crying out loud, make the villains a wee bit more complex in their "evil". I know I'll probably remember a few more things once I've woken up... and come up with some good points then, but right now I just needed to get that out of my system.

Volo, hate to break it to you, but ALL house loans are based on either 15 or 30 year payment plans. The 30 year loan is what gives you the lowest interest rate on your mortgage as the Bank will make more money off it that way than if it was a higher interest rate. This includes my parents house that they just sold (and payed all their mortgages off with the sale earning *drumroll* 3 dollars in profit).

I'm confused here, you didn't buy AC:B and AC:R because you didn't think AC2 was good enough, but what does this have to do with DRM? You're the only person I've ever seen claim the original was better that the sequel which is generally considered by fans and critics alike to be a huge improvement on the original. I think his point was that he was willing to purchase AC2 because the quality of AC was good enough that it overcame his distaste for the DRM. He didn't like AC2 nearly as much, and thus wasn't willing to deal with the DRM for Brotherhood/revelations because he wasn't sure if he'd like it that much.

Homefront is very... badly paced. It has the COD problems of being a series of linear corridors, but unlike CoD there isn't that large of a separation between some of the "bottlenecks" they're using to keep you on the right track. Even stuff as simple as going through a turnstile and up a ladder can be annoying because you have to wait for your allies to do it all first, and then the button prompt pops up as if you're an idiot three miles back. However, the shooting and actual combat is fun.

Or they can remove the book from your reader at any time or lock you out of your account. It sucks to pay almost $1,000 for books you're not allowed access to. And, naturally, moving a book from one's Kindle to one's PC to convert it to a different format is against the EULA. This was from before there were Kindles and Ipads. They'd take an ebook and dl-it onto the computer before it on their desktop to try to get it to work and it'd fail. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.p...oryId=102330373

it ended last weekend because of the fact that it's "gone gold" and people are waiting for the pre-access to begin.

No you idiot, it's "If you don't give me a way to deactivate your ignition interrupt on MY car so I can get to work in the morning, I'm going to rip it out" WHICH (I remind you) Is entirely legal.

... wouldn't it be a tragedy if the Voyager probes were caught in the Oort cloud and demolished?

I think, however, the issue is this As a consumer, I want the game... ONLY THE GAME. Pirates offer this, Publishers offer the game with 6 metric tons of yellow tape, a program that will never be removed from my computer, and a very finniky system that may just declare you a pirate for simply having a cd burner's drivers on your computer. If we were to move, say, from video games, to audio books. You'd probably be surprised to find just how many e-books are pirated. The reason for that piracy is entirely reasonable and justified... the blind buy an e-book, and try to use a text-to-speech program to allow them to hear the story being told to them by microsoft sam (or whoever). The E-Book DRM however, 90% of the time doesn't work with the text-to-speech program, citing it as piracy. Therefore, a LEGITIMATE CUSTOMER who is JUST trying to read a book in the only cost effective manner possible (if they get it in braile(?) it's 12 times the size and costs 12 times as much), end up and pirating a copy of the book. THAT is what volo is seemingly unable to understand (for at least some of this, the other is just him doing his personal dance in a circle), Legit customers should not have the entire enjoyment of the product (which they want to read/play because the actual product itself is quite good) killed because some numbskull in a suit wanted their product locked down. They Legit own a copy, but are unable to use that product because of idiocy, thus they pirate... and to volo, because they pirate they are automatically the scum of the earth. Personally, I think one of the major issues right now is that the people who are creating the DRM are the publishers, not the devs. Publisher (like Ubi) makes a stupid DRM, the dev suffers badly for it while the publisher gets a lot of publicity and money from those like volo. Publishers can take that hit, Dev's often can't. How to curb it? Well the guy from GoG understands what's going on, and the point was mentioned earlier that if you're going to compete with the pirates, you have to provide things that the pirates won't, but also provide things more easily than figuring out the technical tomfoolery of a Torrent system. If you DON'T provide this, you're asking for ridicule and for failure. Right now the media companies are taking a brute force approach to it, sue any idiot dumb enough to get caught pirating for absolutely LUDICROUS amounts of money to try to scare the other pirates into their hidey holes. GoG and Steam are probably the start of a new trend (that we see continuing with Origin) where each company will create it's own browser/service that you work with (or will partner with another company in their browser). I don't think this will work as well as EA is hoping because people don't want to wait 5 minutes for their computers to boot up each and every single publishers personal box to kick in and flood their monitor with windows saying "buy me".

I think he's referring more to the fact that sometimes southpark has the "pop culture" episodes that go after strange pop phenomina (the "You got served" episode, and more recently the one about musicals), and then the ones that do more political/moral commentary about how ridiculous our society can be. The former can be "Meh" to "Oh jesus that hurts" and the latter is usually pretty damn hilarious.

Jeeze... people don't even know how it's going to be and automatically are crying "Sellouts! Heathens! You're Cheapening yourselves for money!" give it a chance... good lord... there have been worse properties made into video games.

Go into a space place where the entire point is to troll everyone else into giving you money? No thanks.

http://kotaku.com/5864572/the-painful-iron...sued-for-piracy I think that's the trap that many people will end up falling into. being against piracy, but accidently pirating yourself

Everyone, until the Guy Ritchie film, saw Watson as effectively a grown up Robin... a guy who's ENTIRE job was to be an idiot and ask stupid questions while Holmes explained things. Now they see him more as the moderator of Holmes in general.

I can confirm that those are excerpts from the script, but I'd guess that it takes QUITE a bit of doing to get to the point where you're married. Particularly if you're being a sadistic torturer to her.

It'll be a good seller if nothing else, and probably make Obs into a more well known house (because you just KNOW that Parker and Stone would put it into one of their games). I could see it being produce not with the boys and co in mind, but more like something around Professor Chaos against the normal crew (who are sort of in-sort of out of character and lean HEAVILY on the fourth wall)

South Park is at it's best not as a satire comedy show that makes a point, as most of their points are either really obvious or rather strawman-ish. They're the best as drawing attention to things that might otherwise be swept under the rug.

But advanced classes from the same base class are mechanically different. A Consular can be a Sage, which specializes in flinging rocks or healing, or a Shadow, which is a stealth melee class that can tank. I was referring more to the consular/inquisitor split. a Consular can become a sage or shadow An inquisitor can become a sorceror or assassin. The shadow and assassin are effectively the same thing (just lightning vs throwing) and the Sorc and Sage are the same thing.