mr insomniac

Took a break from x-com to play some co-op Bulletstorm and Rage on the weekend. Bulletstorm was unsurprisingly intense, with team challenges for creative kills with every wave. I'd forgotten how tough Rage baddies can be to kill. Makes using things like remote control bomb cars to accomplish their deaths even more satisfying. Been awhile since I played Rage, and this got me wanting to try the single-player campaign again . With two weeks until the new ME3 DLC, I should have enough time to satisfy that craving. Also tried out a well designed little tower-defense type game called Toy Soldiers. With a statistic for "highest flying soldier" (as in killed by explosions), we figured it'd be a fun time-waster, and it is. My brother won that competition with a distance of 384 feet.

I hate going broke on the first of the month, taking all that new council-granted wealth, and catching up on all the crap I coudln't afford through the previous month. It takes a while to get past that risk, but it's fun when you do.

X-com. Still X-com. I just lost a colonel (support), another colonel (assault), and a major (assault). The only two other assault soldiers I have are squaddies. I've got another support who's a lieutenant, at least. I've got no money, three countries in the red, a request I can't complete unless I get some chrysalid corpses, and I hate those things, and finally it's 23 days till my next council report. God, I love this game. Gonna co-op some Borderlands 2 this weekend with my brother. We're thinking of starting a new game. Our main characters are way out of sync, in terms of level and where we are in the story.

The more satellites you have operational, the greater your monthly income. They also reduce panic levels, which is nice. They also prevent abduction missions in the territories that you have covered. I didn't know that. Damn, I like those abduction missions sometimes. They can be a good way to get promotions for your low level soldiers.

The more satellites you have operational, the greater your monthly income. They also reduce panic levels, which is nice.

You should channel that alien-killing-prowess and play Space Invaders. Space Invaders isn't turn-based.

Just finished my first playthrough. Final mission was a blast, made especially interesting when four of my squad were killed in one turn... okay, the heavy and the assault trooper were critically wounded but both support troops were outright killed, so the other two couldn't be revived. I counted that as one turn. Damn Mutons. The badly wounded fifth trooper was killed near the end. Luckily my psionic sniper, with her plasma rifle + double-tap was a near unstoppable force and won the day with barely a scratch on her. Only ran into one game-breaking bug. Sent a S.H.I.V. first through a doorway on an alien ship, and for the rest of the squad the game behaved as though the door was still closed, and there was no way to open it. Anyway, very fun game. Now can't decide if I should play it again, or get into Dishonored, or go back to Borderlands.

Argh, I hate having all my good soldiers die right before what I know is gonna be a tough story. It's bad enough having to take maybe one rookie, nevermind three or four. I'm not playing ironman, but in the spirit of the game, I'm not reloading after tough losses, because sometimes there are rewards. Sometimes you get lucky and can get a couple missions where the reward is a new officer.

I envy you. I wish I could go back and play Torment for the first time. You're in for quite the experience. i'm going to hell for this, but, have you tried dying and coming back to life without memories of the game? (floating, talking skull optional) Heh, if I had to go through what the Nameless One had to go through to be able to do that... no thanks, dying once is enough.

I envy you. I wish I could go back and play Torment for the first time. You're in for quite the experience.

Exact same thing happened to me. I watched four guys, who'd been with me from the beginning, get wiped out during the ufo landing mission. For the first time in over a decade I was yelling at the monitor as I watched them fall. argh. I'm thinking I should restart and manage assets a little better.

In fact it was just the opposite for a long time after ME3's release. Even now posts stating how much the game was enjoyed generate a majority of conflicting responses, at least from what I've seen. It was bad enough for awhile that it was Bioware themselves who cracked down on the negativity, not the community.

New to this game, and new to this type of game really. I gotta say I didn't think anything could tear me away from Borderlands 2, but xcom is an absolute blast. I'm still just learning my way around the combat and figuring out how to keep everyone in cover all the time, and only succeeding half the time. Just had my first batch of promotions, although I dunno why, the way this squad couldn't hit the broadside of a barn on the last mission. But nobody died, although my newly promoted support guy is spending the next 18 days in the infirmary.

I've found up until about clvl8-12, most of the time I'd find pistols, any class, from chests or drops. Occasionally a sniper, AR, or SMG, but mostly pistols. Based on comments in forums, I think for some reason the game just favors them until higher levels. ... eg, you're pretty unlikely to get a rocket launcher early on. My Zero didn't get a single non-quest-reward sniper rifle until past clvl9. That said, it is somewhat random so you may have a game/chr. where you'll find less pistols and more of the other things, even in the starter area. And even at higher clvls, pistols seem to be fairly common, while other things tend to go in sporadic spurts (lately all hubby and I get are rocket launchers, seems like). I hear what you're saying. Since I first got a rocket launcher, in my assassin game, it seems like that's the majority of what I find now. Still, I seem to remember getting a better variety of weapons, even if they were crap and barely worth the backpack space, at the early levels with the assassin. I just wondered if the game was glitched because I'd been through these areas already with another character.

Been playing -- well, more like been obsessed with -- Borderlands 2. Had been playing the assassin, but just started a new game as a gunzerker. Not too far into it yet, level 7 or 8, and I'm curious if others have also experienced this: The only guns I've ever looted from chests are pistols, and not very good ones. No assault rifles, shotguns, SMGs or sniper rifles to be found. I've had to buy them from Marcus. Yet with the assassin I was finding all kinds of good loot. Also played a little bit of Medal of Honor recently. Never played it before and was having a great time until I blew myself up with a RPG because I was still partially hidden behind cover when I fired. Oops. Today my copies of Xcom and Dishonored arrived in the mail, and I'm installing them at the moment.

Your challenge is to write crossover fanfiction combining Monty Python & the Holy Grail and Rocky Horror Picture Show. The story should use shopping for an iPad as a plot device!

IIRC, very early in the game you get an ominous sounding report about the Quarians from either the Shadow Broker terminal or the Spectre terminal. Made me think I'd be heading there first. But However, Bioware tried to instill a sense of urgency in bringing the krogan onboard, in the sense that soon there wouldn't be anything left of the Turians or Palaven. You do take the Normandy to the citadel first, and it is the turian councilor who first asks for your help.

5-How the <bleep> did a vorcha end up as *leader* of the Bloodpack (sp?) mercenaries, when they went out of their way to explain in ME2 that they are the brainless canon fodder in a Krogan run military outfit. Having a hard time seeing a nasal whining vorcha command somebody like Grunt or Wrex around. 6-Why did the Reaper artifact in "The Arrival" not only reveal the existence of the Reapers but also gave information on their back up invasion plan? 7-How did Udina end up on the Council if you picked Anderson in ME1? 8-What happened to the poison the Reapers were using against the Krogans and how come the Salarian's sabotage didn't prevent the Reapers from using the Shroud to spread the poison? 9-Why did the Geth Dreadnought have hallways and consoles and medi-gel and all sorts of stuff that the Geth don't need? 10-Why did Legion suddenly call itself "I" and what did that have to do with it becoming a "fully realized AI?" 11-Why did EDI have to use a console to contact Admiral Hackett after they found the Prothean VI at the Cerberus base? 12-How did the Reapers take over the Citadel and why didn't they use it to shut down the Mass Relays? 13-How does anything having to do with Cerberus make any sense? Wow, lots of good questions here, lots to think about, and in the spirit of continuing the discussion: 1- Perhaps because the citadel exploded before the Normandy could get near it, and Joker was just trying to stay ahead of the blast wave? 2- This kinda bugged me too, but... to my mind, Shephard and Anderson are the only ones who get close enough to the beam to reach the citadel, and there's no telling how much time passed before Shepard wakes up in the dark. Perhaps squadmates retreated back to the Normandy during that time? 5- IIRC, most or all of the Krogan in the Bloodpack came from clan Weyrloc, who were absorbed into clan Urdnot after Mordin's loyalty mission in ME2. Perhaps Wrex called them all home? 7- My only guess is Anderson resigned from the council (where he never really wanted to be in the first place), and returned to active duty in the Alliance sometime after Shepard turned the Normandy over to the Alliance. Traynor mentions that Anderson was going to make the Normandy his new mobile command center. 8- All I can think of here is that the sabotage wasn't designed to stop the reaper poison, only to stop anyone messing with the genophage itself.

http://svn.gib.me/builds/masseffect3/ Good save editor here (last link on the list). Alternately, google "gibbed save editor" Or there's this site, if you'd rather have someone else do all the work: http://www.masseffectsaves.com/

Borderlands.

I just finished my first playthrough the other night, and while playing I tried to stay away from any ME3 stuff. I don't live under a rock though. I knew there was a lot of upset over the ending, but like Hurlshot, I felt that sure it could have been better, but it wasn't all that bad. It certainly wasn't Borderlands bad.

Personally, I'm really looking forward to ME3. I thoroughly enjoyed the first two, despite their flaws. In a way, I kinda like that people are still arguing about the same crap they argued about a year or so ago, as I've tried to stay away from too many ME3 details. From what little I have seen, I have no reason to doubt enjoying the concluding chapter.

I clicked on the link and got this: Design #3809424235: It's like a normal alcoholic drink, but it hovers. Hopefully I have more than a single drink on the island. A case or two would be okay. Then, trying to copy the link I accidentally refreshed it and got something at least equally interesting: Design #2251082540: It's a pair of underpants that operates on a quantum level, encrypts all of its data and believes itself to be self-aware.

Because I have Skyrim, Deus Ex:HR and Rage still to finish, and SWTOR on the way, I managed to resist temptation up til now. I couldn't pass up both the stalker and grotesque tactics bundles for a total of $17.