Bartimaeus

Its title card artwork was enough to grab my attention to get me to go to its store page, but it doesn't really look like my type of game...

Anna made me want to bash my skull in with a rusty iron rod - but what they did to Khan was nearly equally reprehensible. Once a passive and semi-spiritual wiseman, now a crack-smoking hippie whackjob who's personally directing and goading you on to your every bloody insane move. Didn't look the same, didn't act the same, and didn't even have the same voice actor - should've been a completely different character, and, in fact, if not for the name, he actually was. I don't remember what the difficulty curve was for Last Light, to be honest - but I do remember 2033's Hardcore/Ranger mods, which made going in guns blazing pretty danged hard unless you were okay with and accounting for the fact you were gonna die one one or two shots (though enemies would as well - but if you were facing multiple at once, you were at a serious disadvantage). My problem, though, lied more with the fact that the stealth simply felt ridiculous: like when you're running through that...Nazi, was it?...prison with Pavel, the entire situation was silly. The lighting of the level was way too bright - they should've spotted you immediately to begin with by Metro 2033 standards (never mind real life); firing your "silenced" revolver in what's essentially an echo-chamber and somehow not being heard by everyone in the room is equally ridiculous, and jeeze, I swear, has no-one heard of actual whispering? Because I'm pretty sure Pavel and the random prisoners you talked to were loud enough that everyone should've heard the various people talking bouncing off the walls and wondered, "hey, where'd everyone go and who are all these not very quiet people talking in semi-hushed tones?". Lack of attention to detail to stuff like that really gets to me, especially when it's for something as critical as the stealth system. Do it right - even if it means stealth won't always be perfectly possible for every single situation, or at least seemingly feasible, which it really shouldn't be to begin with - or don't expect the atmosphere and immersion to hold up. Anna falling in love with you after having only met and talked to you for all of five minutes also darkened my already dour opinion of the game - that was some seriously pathetic and oh-so-forced "storytelling". It was also the final straw for me before I quit.

What Gfted1 said. I am pretty sure it's still there, as I remember getting it while having the "various fan patches, tweaks, and whatnots" installed, I never finished Last Light because the story and characters were insufferable (and not to mention stealth was even more pathetically easy and exploitable than it was in 2033): was it a lot harder to get whatever's the "good" ending in LL vs 2033? Just exploring the levels in 2033 was enough to always be presented the good ending, even if you were constantly committing humanicide.

Your image link leads to here: http://www.pcgameshardware.de/screenshots/nodeeplink.gif

Super Mario Bros. 2 (The Lost Levels) on SNES: currently killing my hands, but...I'm on World D (five after World 8 ), the last one. Tough game.

Wouldn't the 280X be a better value?

Shall I start personally blaming Hoover for the Great Depression, then?

I'm not concerned with what the Forbes writer is talking about - like an earlier poster said, I believe far too much responsibility for our economic conditions - whether good or bad - goes to the credit of the President...undeservedly. So I was curious as to what you thought *he* specifically did that helped our economy. The first link you posted...seems to have a huge list of things not really attributable to him - a whole lot of legislation jointly passed by both parts of Congress, and then signed off by him. Is not being a hindrance for these bills enough to be credited with mild to moderate renewed success of arguably the world's most complex economy? I don't think so. So...your link kind of illustrates the point I was making.

Alright, I'll bite: what did he do that positively affected the economy?

From what I can vaguely recall, there was a bug in the original game with specifically Conrad Verner that the relevant variables weren't set correctly, so that regardless of what you did, it was always going to import to Mass Effect 2 as having been mean to him or whatever...and they never bothered fixing it (perhaps because they noticed late enough that it would be pointless for the majority of players - and since they never bothered creating the minor content if you *had* been nice to him, why bother?).

Well, that was one of the most disappointing losses I've had to sit through recently. Darn our coaching thinking being a score and a half ahead is enough of a lead that we shouldn't have our offense play. Our defense SHUT THEM OUT in the first half, but out offense couldn't make a single one of our five field goals into a touchdown. Even though our offense was weak that game, it was still better than the Seahawk's until the last five minutes of the game. So it goes, I guess. If the Seahawks play like that next week, I don't see any way for them to win the Super Bowl...Tom Brady'll be winning his fourth Super Bowl,

I used to for uploading music, since it was the premier video-sharing site at the time (and still is). Hard to do that without signing in.

I tried watching the first 15 minutes or so (being a fan of the original movie), but didn't really care for what I saw, so I stopped watching. Was the latter part of the show better?

Man, that reminds me that I used to get those all the time. Never accepted one, though - in fact, most of the time, I actually blocked whoever was doing it, unless they just seemed like a regular, random person, in which I just rejected. Most of the time, I get them from random mid-sized channels. Glad that with new YouTube, I don't get those anymore. Of course, with new YouTube, I don't get anything at all anymore because I refuse to use Google+. I miss receiving random PMs...and I miss having a comment system that, while still really bad, wasn't literally the absolute worst comment system I know of, (i.e. YouTube's current). In fact, their pushing of Google+ and the associated "benefits" that came with it were pretty much the entire reason I stopped taking care of my channel and videos. So stupid.

Not the most pleasant version of that song I've heard from them.

Sometimes, I wish I was really good at trolling so I could pretend to be one of these people and construct serious arguments as to why being dragonkin is great (or whatever) and why you're all privileged straight white men who are oppressing me and/or racist. I feel like it would be an endless amount of fun. My only consolation is that nobody else is currently doing it so it's not instead me being infuriated by said trolling. That, and if anyone here actually is one of these kinds of people, they're not making a hullabaloo of it and so probably aren't worthy of my contempt to begin with.

Manning should play for GB next year so that when Rodgers inevitably gets injured and would otherwise cost us our playoff chances, Manning can step in and continue to kick butt. :D

I was seriously amazed when the catch was overturned. I understand why it was ruled incomplete, but it feels and looks like a catch - that I'm a Packers fan doesn't change that. When McCarthy challenged it, I thought it was gonna be the waste of our last time out - it was his FIRST successful challenge all season - and it might cost us the game after we got the ball back with only a few minutes left to make a touchdown (if they successfully got a 2PC) or a field goal (if they didn't). It's hard to say whether or not that cost the Cowboys the game. It certainly cost them the lead, since it would be extremely unlikely they'd not get a touchdown there, but the Packers drove down the field after the ball was turned over and were in field goal range with two minutes left. But...there's no way to tell if that would've actually still happened if the Cowboys had scored a touchdown. A crappy end to an otherwise extremely competitive and tense second half.

It's crazy, to me, how many people have them disabled. I don't understand how people get along without them - desktop, at the very least, would be unusable for normal file downloading and such - would have to view everything in Windows Explorer where it actually displays it. You can enable file extensions in Windows 7 by opening any folder, clicking "Organize" in the top left, "Folder and search options", "View" tab, then unchecking "Hide extensions for known file types" in about the middle of the list. Vista is probably the same - don't know for 8.

I can't believe how many people are falling for this...how do people just open randomly downloaded .exes? Everyone must have visible "standard" file extensions disabled. Run a malware scan. (edit) Ironically, if a keylogger WAS installed, changing your password just makes it worse - if you set Steam to automatically log in upon system startup and remember your password, you'd never type in your password anyways - ergo, it couldn't be recorded. Now that you changed it, however... If you have Steam Guard enabled, I imagine that you also logged into your email...

Bought 2x 4TB WD Blacks at ncixus for $68 each in a super special flash sale...I don't need them at all, but the price was too good. Thinking about selling one to recoup my costs and using the other as a backup...or, actually, I'd probably use it as a main and then make my old 1TB Barracuda the backup. Right after I got them, I refreshed the page and they were already out of stock.

A hint: reload back to where you have at least SOME time on your filters left, and just keep putting on your mask after you nearly asphyxiate and then immediately take it off and rinse and repeat. It's basically infinite filters.

I'd rather have the Packers play the winner of the Cardinals/Falcons game, so even though I obviously don't like Suh, I'm a little happy he's paying a huge fine instead. Hopefully the Lions will "repay" the Packers for their transgression and beat the Cowboys and/or Seahawks for us...though I'm not really expecting either.

Um...or they could both turn out to be bad.