Pop

It has now.

If there's any example of a scenario that might play out under a jihadist rule (besides, eh, Afghanistan under the Taliban, although they didn't seem to have the lofty ambitions of intercultural domination your average jihadist would) I'd nominate Cambodia under Pol Pot, who succeeded (and I use that term very loosely) in demodernizing his nation in the interests of some nebulous "return to glory" of long-ago empires and bolstering defense against imperialism. Maybe a jihadist wouldn't be prone to use of agricultural communism that caused so much famine under Mao and Pol Pot, but they'd exhibit the same reactionary ludditism and anti-intellectualism. They'd probably be just as troubled (Cambodia nearly cannibalized itself)

For the most part, I think you're right, but I still liked the presentation (the "package", if you will) of the Master and the straight-faced lunacy of the President. I also really liked ZAX, for some reason. Still, there are parts of Fallout 2 that are definitely undercooked, to say the least.

Can't go wrong with Chow Yun Fat.

Details or it didn't happen.

ZOMG First Question: Which Obsidian employee do you believe you could most easily take in a fight? Honestly. What was your favorite aspect of the game as you saw it? Which was your fave CNPC? If you can't talk about it, use pig latin, ikelay isthlay. How much work time did you use to play solitaire?

I thought KOTOR2's writing was pretty well done. Kreia was a good villain. The VOs were generally good as well, although I kind of wished they had got somebody other than Ben Stein for Bao-Dur.

I remember Darkest Day as being the one in which they found ways to port over every single CNPC from BG1 that didn't make it into BG2. If only it didn't include that big, sloppy brawl in the docks with Artemis Entreri that yielded entirely too many +1 scimitars.

I find it mildly humorous that you'd take offense to someone insulting you indirectly, and then go on to insult people indirectly. You have succeeded in amusing me. I'll never understand how you can manage seeming so bitter over this stuff.

Meh. I liked PoP: Two Thrones back when it was called The Suffering. Any PoP game without Jordan Mechner's input is bound to suffer.

I think their Florida park had Shamu, or at least Keiko. Maybe I'm mixing up my whales. There's a really old park in Denver, Elitch Gardens, that Six Flags bought out. So far as I can tell, most all Six Flags are like that. They're amusement parks (think carnivals and such) as opposed to theme parks (Disneyland, Universal Studios, etc.) which extends their novelty a bit longer.

Why don't you quit it forever then?

We haven't gotten force-naked, no.

The Bourne Ultimatum. Better than the book, definitely. David Straitharn makes a great villain, and the hand-to-hand combat sequence in Tangiers is the best I've ever seen. Great chase sequences, too.

It's also got a very high maintenance cost, depending on how deep you go.

Thanks Josh. Whipped up a little crude, utilitarian character sheet.

Old ****-blocker.

I'd put images of the Killing Fields or the concentration camps above it. Or pictures of nuclear tests.

Our K-12 education system sucks sucks sucks, but our graduate schools are the best in the world.

The Japanese have a very odd relationship with their recent history. While Germany has been open and honest almost to the point of masochism regarding the events of WWII during the last 70 years, Japan has never really come to terms with its history, in many ways they've outright denied it (a recent example being the matter of mainland "comfort women" sex slaves demanding restitution). An objective view of the war is best found elsewhere.

mmm Amon Tobin.

One problem I always had with Civ games, that for whatever reason I never had with Alpha Centauri, was I always had a weird aversion to open conflict with other civs. I haven't played through a whole game of Civ 4 yet, but one of the things I found peculiar about reading up on it that probably contributes to the space problem is that the computer will divide a map (if it has continents) into Old and New worlds. If you start an "Earth Map" scenario, you can only choose European, Mesopotamian and Asian civilizations to start with, in the Old World. I started my game as the Chinese, and were my game not on Easy, the 3 civs flanking me (India, Mongolia and Japan) would have smoked my ass out. I'm not sure if there are computer Civs established in the Americas, but if there aren't there's a huge imperative (and probable "discoverer" game perks) to get there first, if not just for the space. All my Chinese Jewish empire really covers at the moment is Manchuria, the Korean peninsula, some of Southeast Asia (India is a vassal state) and parts of Siberia. I've got Mongolia neatly in a pincer should we ever go to war, though my Siberian cities' distance from the capital means frequent denied petitions to revert to Mongolian control. I've been building world wonders at 4 or 5 different cities, overall the game has been waaaaay too easy. Greece is the other big civ at the moment, with roughly a quarter of my score and control of the Mediterranean. Civ is one of those franchises that boasts major overhauls with each iteration. Frankly, I've always preferred the second game, especially in regard to the soundtrack, but it lacks certain useful features, such as building queues. I actually find some parallels to the Elder Scrolls. Second game was the best and the games got bigger, shinier, shallower and less compelling with every iteration. Then, ES never had a game like Alpha Centauri which featured the best qualities of the second and third editions of the series.

Nu video of Left 4 Dead gameplay. It is made of love.

There are some crimes, sadistic or sexual in nature, that more often than not speak to a pathological problem. Rates of recidivism among sex offenders are abnormally high.

All we really need is the "Vital Status" part of the document and the system would be easily playable. As it stands, I'd like to know how fatigue is supposed to work, at least. Either that's something we both missed, or it's something Sawyer didn't put up on his wiki.