Rostere

The music, is it from AP? OMG, sounds like Alex Brandon!

Yep, that's basically my opinion as well. Neither China nor the US ever does anything to impose their own politics upon the other. I don't see any Chinese Krushchevs talking about the "victory over capitalism" and I don't know of a single US reprimand (in recent times) against China which has gotten any real result. Besides, on the paper the US and China (or indeed China and the rest of the world) are not THAT different. PATRIOT act (FRA legislation in Sweden), death penalty in the US, and several other things which come to mind when you think about it are things we would perhaps rather like to associate with an authoritarian nation, and not with our own. I would not say trade is necessarily a means to achieve peaceful change, although from trade follows several opportunities.

Still, there's a reason why we trade with China and not "any other poor nation". It's all got to do with economy. If there was a better deal elsewhere, you'd trade more with "any other poor nation". Still assuming the reason we trade with China is based on rationality, the trade exchange is a mutual relationship where both parts are equally dependent upon each other. China's dollar reserve is an example of this. China has a national reserve of about two trillion dollars and the US has a national debt of 11 trillion dollars. From these numbers, it would not seem that China should be the exporting nation. And yet they are, and they also do everything in their power to sell as much as they can to the US. If China stops selling (and stops buying US debt and storing US dollars), the US will get increasingly hard to get both imported goods and raw materials. If the US stops buying and investing in China, China's money supply will be stifled. Either way, both lose. It is silly how people today look at the US and China as potential enemies. Of course they both definitely have the means to hurt each other, but a conflict would be futile and it wouldn't benefit anyone. In the end though, I think it all boils down to whether the rest of the world continues to trust the dollar or not, because neither China nor the US would change the current status quo.

My favourite Big Rigs review:

I don't understand why they can't make 360's that last long when people can build ordinary computers at home that does not need to be repaired every x months or so.

I want Arcanum 2!

"Top 100"- lists suck. IGN sucks, hard. So why even bother?

The problem is not really if more politically engaged people also should have more political power, but who should choose these people. And who would choose those? At the core of the problem lies the fact that there is nothing we can say or do to prove that we are genuinely better persons than others, it is only a matter of what you personal opinion.

I think the Mortuary was so great because other games always try to explain a lot of things in their introductions. Instead, Torment explains very little and almost instantly has you wondering about a lot.

The only part I enjoyed and that gets old fast. "Look, an entirely new subway station, unlike any you've seen before!"

Well, I do agree with everything you say except for that fewer abilities for your weapons is a sign of "dumbing down". Portal (for example) only had one gun with two abilities, but I thought it was a good game anyway. Most of the augs in Deus Ex were not tied directly to using any weapon, so that's a different thing. It is true that there were more weapons in Deus Ex. Of course, if you could choose anything you want for AP, I would like to have an infinite amount of abilities (or maybe the ability to create new abilities ). But it's my personal opinion that there are more important thing to a game than the number of guns/ modes of fire/ abilities. Hopefully, AP will not be all about shooting people in the head using as many different guns as possible.

I keep reading this as "Elvis with a shotgun" for some reason. Which gives me this bizarre idea of playing dead pop-culture stars who die and wake up in a bizarre purgatory where they have to arm themselves and fight for a place in heaven. It could never happen due to licensing of stars images, but man does it kinda freaks me out. That is an awesome idea. Kind of like a mix of Unreal Tournament, Celebrity Deathmatch and SingStar Pop Hits.

How many special abilities did weapons in Deus Ex have? I wouldn't judge a game only by the number of spells/abilities et.c.

This is steampunk. Or at least it is to steampunk what Spelljammer is to FR.

Setting must be plain weird. Thus I vote for Lexx rpg. Imagine this with Chris Avellone and George Ziets doing the writing. It will be epic. And the music... oh god the music. Hell yeah, that show is legendary. But I would prefer Obsidian to create their own IP. If the game is successful, it's a good investment. Although speking of Obsidian expanding uopn already existing IP's, one of the first ideas that struck me when I heard Obsidian were working with Sega on the Alien game and AP was that they could acquire the rights to make a Jet Set Radio rollerskating/graffiti RPG . That would own.

I make a policy of not buying console to PC ports. I can't really see how I've missed much, but then I'm not much of a fan of action games, probably the only genre with worth- to- mention console- exclusives. Ah ok, I own the SH games (buggy ports, good games) for PC but that's about it.

There's a nice little program called "Guitar Pro" (Guitar Pro 5 should be the latest version, I think) which you'll learn to love and cherish. I am a guitarist/ bassist myself and I have used it for about five years now, both to learn new songs and to write down my own/ make tabs for other songs. Good luck in your guitar playing!

That is an exciting idea. Personally though, I'd like to see some new settings. I would like the game designers to just choose their favourite pieces of art, mix them together, let their imagination flow, and create a RPG out of it all. Maybe I'm an insane artist, but I really don't understand why developers always choose to base their RPGs on the same ****ing generic fantasy/scifi worlds.

You mean just like they've been doing since, basically, the day it was invented? Of course I would be happy if they would actually do something, but that does not change my line of reasoning.

I don't know if we'll ever see that , but we could always do drunk Obsidian fan podcasts (lol?) in the meantime. Or drunk Obsidian forum posting. Or just be drunk.

Judging from the beta, it will be a fun game, albeit completely different from it's predecessor. First one was more massive. This is more "in- depth tactical". I'd like to say it's more like real 40k, but then there are 5000pts matches so maybe that wouldn't be fair to DoW 1. I have only played with SM and Eldar and only about 30 games, but it seems very well balanced.

100% agree. The EU has already been hijacked by various lobby groups and countries with protectionist policies. See this for example. Short summary: the EU is paying money to [French] farmers so that they can continue a highly inefficient agricultural production. This, coupled with price regulations, allows them to sell their wares at an inflated price in Europe and dump their overproduction in non-EU countries, destroying their own production (example: Brazil). Frankly, both the economy in the Europe and the economy of the rest of the world would be better off without the EU. I mean, think it through - almost 50% of the budget goes to agricultural subsidies, while only 5% of the EU's population works on farms, and the farming sector is responsible for less than 3% of the GDP of the EU.

I note with interest which parts of the actual conflict you leaved out of your analogy. For example: Why are these people fighting? I have no delusions that if Hamas swapped arms with Israel there wouldn't also be substantial bloodshed. In fact, I think that at least initially more people would die that way than with the current balance of power. However with power comes responsibility, and that is why I mainly criticize Israel (and also because there are no Hamas supporters on this forum...). You see, this is really a deeper problem. The Palestinians have suffered a lot of atrocities which incites them to fight. Israel also has a similar amount, although they lie further back in time. And just as firing rockets on Israel will not create peace, bombing Gaza will also not serve to make peace. This invasion is executed with complete disregard of why there is a fight at all. I do not say that Hamas should take no blame, only that the current Israeli startegy will only prolong the conflict. And in the end it's Israel that gets to choose wich game they want to play. I wonder how they could even think they are solving anything. Remove Hamas today, and another extremist organisation will take power tomorrow as long as the underlying problems aren't solved. Would it help the Palestinians if they inflicted casualties on the Jewish population similar to the ones they have suffered themselves? I think not.

Actually, the way I chose to formulate my response was to address the notion that "since Israel is a Jewish state, if Israel does not have predominantly Jewish population, it will cease to exist". You will find ideas similar to that one of you look around a bit on the Internet. If "Wrath of Dagon" (or anyone else!) is no adherent to that way of thinking, I am happy. Besides, suicide bombing and the kind of conflict we're seeing now (or have been seeing, lately) did not exist in the Israeli- Palestine region until around the mid- eighties. Letting people back, as long as the general population is under police control, would not have been to large a problem, at least judging from the Arabs who had not been forced to leave Israel. We're discussing events that happened way early - I agree that you can't just open the borders with no restrictions today, but part of the reason for that lies with that Israel did not do so from the very beginning. If anything like that had happened, the circumstances today might have been entirely different. But maybe even that would have been impossible considering that Israeli settlers had already razed so many of the villages and built their own homes on top of them, at least I was surprised when I first learnt of how fast that happened. You could ask yourself why not more of the Arabs currently living in Israel are firing rockets and all that. With all I've seen on the Internet, the IDF would not stop at bombing a (Palestinian) kindergarten if they knew a terrorist was hiding there. They are utterly careless about who they are killing, or maybe they don't understand that killing (civilians) will only bring more bloodshed, and bring everyone farther from peace. Do you believe that it is of the essence that you kill civilians, if you want to achieve peace? No? Then, you do at least in part agree with me, only that I feel this entire business has gone crazy more than you do. I think three ambulances has been somehow attacked - two was fired at by helicopters and one by a tank (see here)- with resulting casualties. One of these, I'm sure, belonged to an organization other than Hamas. I don't know of the other two though.

I'd like to make that came, keeping in mind the current rate of suicide bombers from the West Bank. Most of the suicide bombers in the West Bank targetted Jewish settlements, settlements which by the way are illegal under international law. The reason not as many suicide bombers come from Gaza is that Gaza has never had as many Israeli settlers, and those few who had occupied land there were forcibly removed by the Israeli government. So in short, since Palestinians and Israelis have not been living side to side in Gaza, and that is the reason there were fewer suicide bombs there. Of the 1.4 million people living in Gaza, about 1 million are refugees, who were either expelled and not allowed to return by Israel or urged to leave by Egypt, fearing a massacre either by Jewish Orthodox militias or simply one from being caught in the crossfire. There are examples of all of these: check this. So, I would say that the fact that Gaza is crowded with people is very much Israel's doing. Back to where? If you've not yet realized that fact, Gaza is basically a large squalid refugee camp. You know, Israeli refugees of Arab descent are not allowed to come back again (not that their old houses aren't bulldozed to the ground anyway). I've honestly not heard of any attempts by Israel to improve economic conditions in Gaza. Care to elaborate? Well, mostly true. But still, the reason to why Hamas won in Gaza and not in the West Bank? Perhaps... That the low standard of living caused by recent events made the Gazans support more radical political elements? Look, Sweden recieves a lot of refugees (immigration is about three times as high as the US, if you compare it to the total population), and I'm certainly not ceasing to exist. On the other hand, I get new friends, kebab and Albanian folk music. Last time someone tried to create a country where the inhabitants' rights were judged by their race, things went bad. But I guess to some people, crazy ideas like that will never cease to exist. And yes lol, I'd prefer a heart that is bleeding over none at all. I was showing actions and attitudes which were close to genocide (Different races have different rights + one is looked upon as a "threat"). The emphasized sentence makes me sick to even read... You obviously have no concern for other people's right to live at all. You should read the different news reports where Israeli military are reported firing on ambulances who try to get to injured (or dead?) civilians. Don't you have a family yourself? Can't you relate in ANY way to what's happening?