the_dog_days

With nearly seven or eight of the top QBs being in their mid to late thirties, I foresee a QB drought in two to four years with guys either retiring or wearing down to eventual backup status. Late 2010's NFL could look a lot like early 2000's with teams with a good run game and great defense winning Super Bowls (at least of a couple year stretch).

I saw that. Rosenhaus has represented some of the biggest NFL problem children but he dropped Manzel (first client he's ever dropped) in a single Lunar cycle. My take is that he didn't think Manzel can make Chad Johnson money.

I listen to audio books while working my second job. I just finished Hard Luck Hank: Screw the Galaxy, and it was the single funniest thing I've ever read/had read to me. Highly recommend especially if you have an Audible account.

The game looks interesting and I was about to put it in my cart at one time, until I read the review saying "Reinvents the 4X genre, mirroring what XCOM did for tactical turn-based games" and then it promptly flew out of my cart again. Would love to see some impressions of the game The tech tree is unbalanced, but it has more personality than any 4X game I've played since Alpha Centauri, plus you can play as a murderous anthropomorphic insect race.

But even in Bioware games, and I've played and participated in almost all Bioware Romance games except for DA:I ( havent played it yet ), the Romance options are still optional and not intrusive...meaning if you don't want Romance you just ignore those choices during the dialogue I still find hard to believe you guys can have such a serious contention with them...I would understand if Romance was forced on you in the game ? In their last three or four games BioWare's romances have been very intrusive. Off the top of my head, DA 2 and Mass Effect 3 actually force you into romantic dialog even if you've barely spoken with characters (DA2 Anders tries to hit on you five minutes after meeting you, and every ME3 who is romanceable will eventually ask you if you want to go out back for a quickie). DAI companions don't try to corner you like DA2 and ME3, but still managed to be even worse because while not romancing anyone all the party dialog while you're just walking around is about how horny all the companions are, and that's not hyperbole.

Guys you mustn't be anti-Romance, Romance adds a more realistic level of character interaction and makes characters generally more memorable Also isn't Romance optional? Romances in a pick-one-out-of-a-lineup does not add realism. The only video game romances I've ever seen actually work were the kind where you aren't playing as a blank-slate character and all cut scenes are cinematic with no or little player input. Such romances can be good or bad, just like a movie romance, but when the character is entirely left up to player control and there's a list of a dozen girls, guys, aliens, and poorly rendered giant grey gumbies not only does it not feel realistic, it also feels pandering, lazy, and like a porn game they put a handful of combat scenarios onto last minute. (And yes, I'm digging on BioRomance.)

They added romances to a new expansion of a nearly twenty year old game? Ugh.

I don't think he's going to be a bad back, I just think that you can find another back just like him in the fourth round up to rookie free agency.

From a role playing standpoint, I love my rogue (former pirate) and my monk (death godlike + monk = Death Monk--I like to listen to Slipknot while I play him).

I think Henry is a prime bust candidate. He's a straight line runner, needs to get a head of steam, isn't very flexible/has limited lateral movement, and benefited from a great offensive line and a run heavy scheme. Not that he wasn't a great college back, but at best I think he's a Brandon Jacobs clone.

They don't need a probowler, but a solid starter who won't miss every other game, not because of the talent they have but because they need to sell to the people of California to buy tickets when there are three(?) NFL teams in the state.

Still playing Fire Emblem Fates. If I hadn't played Awakening this would probably be around the time I realized the support/marriage mechanics are actually a eugenics meta-game and start to feel uncomfortable about it, and then realize that if I mated a knight with a ninja I could make the ultimate melee class.

BioWare would license that for ten games, slap a poorly design combat rule-set on it and their fanboys would call it an innovative RPG.

Aside from both being fantasy party based RPGs, POE and Baldur's Gate have almost nothing in common. There are a few nods to the classic IE games, but that's about it. Pillars isn't an epic but a personal quest. Comparing the villain of an epic to the villain of a personal quest will always result in the epic's villain winning.

Hilarious, but my interpretation of the Batman/Catwoman relationship is that for both of them it's more about danger than mystery.

I've got to admit, the Fire Emblem games look like something I'd enjoy, but I've no interest in buying a console (particularly a handheld...I had one and I barely used it...not sure I finished a single game.) I suppose I could find an emulator and such, but I'd rather have some legal way to play them. The best thing about the 3DS is Nintendo had been putting their back list (to borrow a publishing phrase) in the Nintendo Store. Zelda, the original Pokémon games, some of the old Mario games are on there.

As someone who looks at this thread for funny and no politics, I agree that this needs to go in the election thread. And preferably it stays there.

Broke down and finally bought Fire Emblem Fates. Five hours in and I liked Awakening much more. Not a bad game, but Fates' opening doesn't have the same effect as robot zombies falling out of an interdimensional hole in the sky.

Just finished Dragon's Dogma. In terms of fidelity, it's probably the best Japanese PC port I've played in recent memory. The problems it had with textures and frame rates are fixed with PC (the textures still aren't great, but Capcom had to scale them back to add the Dark Arisen expansion because of the old engine they were using). It's still Dragon's Dogma, mind you. I thought it was pretty amusing to scale the dragon, stabbing repeatedly in the heart with a dagger while it spouted philosophy at me (yeah, don't preach at me bro), the anti-aliasing also looks like someone smeared all the faces with Vaseline, even in a room full of mindless pawns the player character always managed to have the least and most confused facial expressions, and Capcom nearly perfected BioWare's greatest ambition: a random romance generator (if it was titled 'Random Romance Generator' they would have to give it the subtitle 'Whether You Want It or Not' because as far as I can tell, you end up with a romantic interest regardless of if you attempt to). But it was a fun game, definitely worth playing on PC and it was a great decision to hold off on porting it until they managed to work out most of the kinks.

The speed of Eora's rotation is governed by a Giant Space Pig on a hamsters wheel at the center of the planet. Should Atlas 2.0 ever stop running the world will come to an abrupt halt, send billions of kith into space with the force of the built up inertia (minus the effects of gravity, atmospheric pressure, and shoe traction).

That viking guy looks awesome. Makes me want to play Skyrim.

Those are pretty awesome. I especially like the second one.

And every Skyrim player who's ever wiped out an entire village for stealing their sweetroll must also be advocating mass murder . . . right.

I sympathize with Durance and actually like him more than Chris Avellone's other character, Greaving Mother. Durance and Eder's back stories share a lot in common: both of them are patriots who defended what they thought was right, and both returned home to find the home they were protecting wasn't quite the home they remembered. Eder's reaction was to hope the uproar passes, while Durance was outraged at being used and discarded and reacted violently. That said, I still don't like the structure of Durance's quest.

Same here. I like having the time to plan out my next strategy regardless of how often modern gamers cry about immersion in combat.