Tigranes

That's your personal experience - the BG series was well marketed, given good shelf space, sold well for its time, gave Bioware its reputation, and was in every sense of the word a successful franchise.

I don't think the "BG Crowd" can be so easily dismissed, the games sold well and have been supported for a decade by a very dedicated community, and the games themselves have achieved a high level of cultural... thingy. Obviously what Boo means by the BG crowd is a bit more exclusive.

I want to patch NV for my next playthrough but of course the moment I put Steam back online it tries to update itself, and naturally, since it now has to do something useful, it keeps hanging. I've restarted it more than a dozen times over 2 days and the progress bar goes up and down randomly. Good to know some things still stay the same (crap). Good thing I'm taking a break playing or I'd be pissed.

OP doesn't sound like a remake, just revisiting the Master & FEV. It would be interesting if they took an alternate take on what happened back then, but the whole VR stuff gets pretty damn far-fetched when you make it the core mechanism. And I guess the thing is if you played FO1, then you got a very good lowdown of the whole business already.

My vanilla was in DVD case.

Shopping around for a cheapish multi FX pedal for the guitar - invested in a Les Paul a while back but still stuck with the tiny Marshall which is a depressing state of affairs. Looking at a Line6 Pod XT second hand right now and thinking that's probably the best I can get without spending $.

I think the whole "With Assange or Against Assange" dichotomy doesn't help here either. You will notice that I'm not exactly wanting him defended - if we're looking at it from the pov of "does Assange deserve", yeah, he brought this on himself through his love of the spotlight. I just don't think that's particularly important, or a healthy way of looking at it. The real question regarding, say, those pickup emails, is not whether Assange deserves the ridicule, but what good purpose does it serve for us to sit there and laugh at someone else's private life like that and whether that distracts us from looking at the issue as a whole in a better light. Got to run so can't finish this, but yes, the fact that all the recent cables were just pointless gossip is part of this, too.

I did Cass & Boone & ED-E quests, but Veronica broke on me. I still haven't ever met Raul, isn't he meant to be the ghoul in Black Mountain? But I look around and he's never there.

Just finished my 3rd playthrough, it was quite fun with the Legion but I wish if you killed Caesar during his tumour operation you could have become the new head - I guess that would've needed to be backed up by having more quests with the Legion, though, and even then it would be a push. Despite destroying Forlorn Hope, bombing HELIOS, etc., I only became Idolised with them at the very end. Next up is an Energy Weapons character with Arcade Gannon, but I think I'll finally take a bit of break from FNV. Patch it up too, and wait for the DLC maybe.

While I won't presume to guess at Orogun's own motivations, I think in general this kind of thing is quite interesting and possibly worrisome, in that so often, a media controversy or scandal really encourages us to take the position of the derisive bystander. If the public punishments of earlier times were situations that called on you to come and watch, be reminded of how despicable some people (i.e. not you) can be, and rail in righteous anger for self-satisfaction, it's the same thing here with what is, to be honest, a petty and contemptible party of bile and vitriol. Predictably, the rape accusations against Assange (which is far far away from being proven either way) have helped do what the condemnations of politicians and commentators could not alone - reduce him into a caricature which can then be demonised, Othered and laughed at in various ways. While this excessive media limelight was brought on by Assange's own behaviour (and is one of the reasons I can't see him as a hero in any way), the predictable trajectory this story as a whole has taken is quietly depressing - from debates of transparency, democracy and governance we now have Julian the Nerd and the Secret Memos of Who-Called-Who-A-Pimply-Potato. Edit; you can see this most clearly if you read the post, but skip over Assange's actual emails, then start on the comments; this stops you from being drawn into how sordid they might be, and look at the public tomato-chucking going on.

Wait, so DA2 doesn't have friendly fire on any difficulty, or just on higher ones? If higher it doesn't affect me (as I'd then have it), otherwise... meh, it's not great. Friendly fire is an important part of a lot of tactical fun in squad combat, "essential" or not. I can see the reasoning behind tying it to difficulty thoguh. Also, both Fenris are clearly imitations of the real Fenstermaker.

Perhaps in 5 years or so we might be able to take a look at the original script. It's happened before.

Diablo 3! Wait, with that schedule they can probably delay to 2012. The rest is a big big meh.

I wonder if any Dragon Age universe characters have died from foreign blood getting in their eye. On the walkthrough, actually, that looks OK - it looks like DAO but more frenetic, which isn't a bad thing. The RTwP games in 3D have always looked like stilted slow motion dancing (NWN1 the best example, as the earliest) and this tries to make the combat look & feel fun - and if the game is as responsive as it looks in that video (heh) then it would do what the devs are clearly wanting to do. GUI is pretty ugly but I could probably live with it... this video in itself seems to suggest you can still play DA2 the way you did DAO, which is pretty promising after all the talk about Magic Buttons.

Raithe, my cooking level is where I dump milk, sugar, eggs, butter and chocolate or some combination thereof and mix until it looks unrecognisable. Sounds good though, it never looks hard when other people describe it.

Looks cool, though not a fan of blue ghost people firing psionci bursts from ze head.

You people eat like kings. I stay away from Christmas stuff so I don'te ven know what half of those things are. Today I baked a Christmas Cake for the gf. Actually, that's a lie. It's a plain chocolate cake with a penguin wearing santa hat, christmas tree & snow roofed house as decoration. Oh well.

Boone just wants you to think he's not looking at you. He always looks.

Yeah, I thought I might get 1&2 while it costs virtually nothing, then get 3 for free with my preorder if I like it. Nobody will help me choose between AOW & HOMM? edit: OK, I went with JA2, Arx Fatalis, ROA1&2 and AOW:Shadow Magic. Less than 20USD and sets me up nicely as I wind up FNV.

Awesome. I'm going to get; -Jagged Alliance 2 ($5) -Arx Fatalis ($3.50) -Realms of Arkania 1&2 ($3) I think I could get one more, but I'm wondering whether to get HOMM3 ($7), or one of the Age of Wonders. I loved King's Bounty, HOMM3 is supposed to be the golden classic, right? I also remember enjoying Age of Wonders II when I was younger, but don't know which one (1,2, Shadow Magic) I should get.

What is this, nobody's playing anymore? Legion Unarmed playthrough going well, ~15 hours and just done Freeside. Currently at Mixed rep with NCR - been trying hard to keep it reasonable after getting the Rangers warning (3 days to improve rep or you're going down, mister) early on. What I want to do now is go to McCarran & Bitter Springs and try and do all the minor NCR quests without helping them too much, then nuking the NCR garrison at Helios, and then visiting Lucky 38 to receive the embassy invitation & pardon. A bit gamey, but I don't know if otherwise NCR will shoot me everywhere and I'll miss out on a lot of content. Paladin Toaster is mowing everything down, though I've spent at least 20k repairing it so far.

Agreed, I'm doing solo right now and the difference is marked. That's good about energy weapons - I've never had a proper Energy char in any Fallout, though.

Ah right. (Scary.) Well you could speculate that Radiant AI was indeed capable of doing the things shown in the video and then got toned down, as opposed to scripting. I guess your point is that we will never know for sure - and you're right about that. I am pretty sure that I read somewhere how the area was sealed off and prepared for the preview, but would be a mission to dig that up now. As for 'blockout' really it was less 'evil conspiracies' of briberies, threats, corruption, etc (though since then we've seen a lot of smoke and some fire that this does indeed happen sometimes), but more of Bethesda doing what you'd call smart PR - they were one of the most canny in the industry about fudging things here and there to look good. Completely laudable, if you have a Volonian ideology, but I didn't like it so much.

I did play about half an hour of the original ME1, and I ended up reading pretty extensive Let's Plays of ME1&2 - I was curious, and was prepared to pick up the copies if I found the LPs intriguing. In the past I've stopped reading LPs after a couple of chapters to go out and buy the game. What I saw was a lot of really bland dialogue, generic sci-fi stuff that didn't always fit together properly, increasingly limited character customisation (I found KOTOR series pretty bad on that account too, actually - only saving grace was lightsabers), and way too easy, clunky combat. Didn't help that I'm not a fan of sci-fi. Certainly I think I gave it a fair go, and I can see how other people might get sucked into it - slick Bioware delivery, well fitted together gameplay mechanics to keep you going, etc.