Monte Carlo

Diablo 2 of course.

When the folks who make Medal of Honor start making branded prosthetic limbs for the kids who get maimed by IEDs, to make the average player understand that war isn't a digital theme park, then I'll develop a bit of respect. Games should stay games. Making branded offensive weapons? Where next? An ARMA2 branded Predator Drone? FFS.

This movie is dull, lazy, insulting. Not for any political reason, you can demonise the North Koreans as much as you like but this is a country with no infrastructure or diplomatic muscle to lead a girl scout cookie sale, let alone a military coalition capable of threatening a super-power. The first premise of any fiction, especially incredible fiction, is to create suspension of disbelief. Was there some sort of natural disaster that led to NK becoming a credible threat to the US? Is there some sort of political instability that renders America less able to defend itself? These issues need to be addressed to create suspension of disbelief. IIRC, in the original (where, laughably, Cubans played a similar role) the movie starts with parachutes just falling out of the sky. The exposition, hazy as it is, comes later. In the 1980s Cold War environment you could (almost) get away with that. Now? It's just laugh-out-loud ridiculous. The people who made this movie need to be punished. Do not go and see it.

Am reading Reamde by Neal Stephenson, I wish I was as clever as this guy, even if he is a bit too clever for his own good now and then. I think a lot of the people here would dig it.

It's not an either / or call is it? And Romney's a rich boy. If he'd made the money himself I concede the point, but pa wasn't sort of a nickel or two, was he?

Yes, I saw the original. It was funny.

Just saw the Red Dawn trailer. Guard Dog will be upstate when the scary North Korean paratroopers land. He will dig a hole and drink heavily until they go home. xD

Red Dawn? Canada should have invaded. That would be funny. Jesus, it looks awful. And the idea that any of the major powers could actually invade the continental USA apres-Cold War is actually offensive. In the midwest folks will be watching the skies after this one. It really does look like Team America made flesh. Of course, it could simply be the most subversive piece of cinema of the 21st century, a thinly-disguised Iraq parable. "Look what we do abroad guys... this is how we're seen..." Nah. It's Team America made flesh.

I don't understand this guy's back-story. Dad was a small-town lawyer. Tragically, when he's sixteen, Ryan comes home and finds him dead from a heart attack. He makes good by dint of hard work and public support. Now the guy wants to decimate welfare spending on the most vulnerable people in America. I'm hardly a quivering Socialist, but I don't get this guy. I've seen his videos on the deficit, they make sense by and large but... and but. Is he a flinty-hearted Ayn Rand fanboy slavering to scale back the state, making the rich even richer (yes, Mitt, that means you) or is he an aw-shucks Reaganomics hopeful for the GOP. Answers on a postcard. And regardless of the VP, the answer to the problem that is Obama ain't Mitt Romney. He makes George Bush look like Dwight Eisenhower. Romney *comes across* as an identikit American president as designed by a European committee of yank-haters - moulded out of plastic, ignorant, dim-witted and greedy. And if Obama got out his birth certificate then Mitt can dig out his tax returns.

Funnily enough, Iron Maiden played their debut gig in a pub merely a beer-can's throw away from the Olympic Stadium.

That isn't what he was saying, whatsoever. Altho' I doubt he needs me to point that out. Taken to it's logical conclusion, your view is that games have intuitive rulesets that adapt intelligently to your playing style, like cruise control on a car. We have games like this.... we call them First Person Shooters where the key metrics are the weapon you equip and your hand-eye coordination. I'm crap at those, for me understanding the rules and using them properly (the meta-game as you rather disparagingly call it, which exists more brutally in other genres, like FPS and RTS games) is part of the attraction of CRPGs.

I take it all back. They are playing Commie wank-fantasy imagine by Lennon, the zombie Beatle who won't die. FFS.

I can't begin to explain how moving the closing ceremony was for me. I was born, and will die, in London. My city for better or worse. The BBC, an organisation I often loathe, nailed it. I am of the centre-right, and see no contradiction between that and loathing racism and homophobia. I embrace athletes like Mo Farah, who some ****tards have questioned because he was born in Somalia. He, as far as I'm concerned, is as British as I am and **** anybody who says anything different. This is what identity means in the 21st Century: a decision. I know I'm rambling but I hope you dig where I'm coming from. And well done USA, putting China on the back-foot rocked.

I am not a big fan of Mister Obama. However, I am also wary of Mister Romney. Partially because of his wacky religious views, and partly that I suspect he couldn't find his own arse with a map. His VP choice is an ideological wet-dream for the Tea Party. In times when the sun was shining economically, it could work. Right now? I imagine that the Democrats are laughing their socks off. A negative campaign based on fear, and Mister Ryna's utter lack of real-life experience outside of politics awaits. Of course, Obama has never had a real job in his life, either. But he is the incumbent. The job is his to lose, not to win.

Yes, agreed. Also agreed, 4E seems to use some trading-card game tropes too and those seem to translate well onto the PC (altho I am happy to stand corrected as I do not play them myself). The charm of D&D computer games used to be the fact that they were based from a rule-set that originated in tabletop gaming. 4E is ironic as it is the same concept in reverse, it's a pen and paper computer game.

^ 5th Edition is an interesting concept, in that it is attempting to allow some sort of core rules with bolt-ons from all other editions. A sort of house-rules frenzy. Agreeably old-skool and ironically the very thing Advanced D&D tried to eliminate. Pop will eat itself and all that. So perhaps a 2E-heavy D&D variant that could still get away with being 5E-ish might be possible. I think it would be in Hasbro / WotCs interests cuz no publicity is bad publicity* * POR2 notwithstanding.

Fall. Pffffft. See you in the autumn old chap!

Well, if you like a game it's quite important. If you like soccer and take a keen interest in the off-side rule, that makes sense. Because it is a key law of the game that impacts on outcome. For computer games that adapt from pen and paper I think that the spirit and feel of the game is more important than the actuality or rules. But the architecture of the game system is not unimportant. Are we agreed, or was your comment merely a trite dig to prove you are too kool for skool?

^ You could use the front of the ship to balance a pizza on.

First part is a debunked rumour, final part is of the level I hear every day at the water cooler at my own place of employment. The only new info is the EA response to what Greg is doing, ie. enjoying a nice holiday with his family after a sizeable part of his former team has been sacked. I think some dude from the EA deniable ops unit is en route to Greg's place now. And the reason we all hated DA2 was: 1. Narcissism/ Hubris. Bio had such a hard-on for themselves, they sucked up their own hype. Gaider isn't George RR Martin, he needs to get over it. 2. Nor is Gaider Joss Wheedon. Don;t get me wrong, I don't like his stuff either. 3. DA:O was actually quite good. Then they went and designed the sequel using data aggregation instead of, y'know, interacting with humans.

I think that's a fair question to ask... but srsly 4E sucks donkey balls. It really is that awful, an attempt to make a pen and paper game out of WoW style tropes. I'm relaxed about all the others, even 2E which was my least favourite. Put it like this, many grognards (I count myself among them) lauded 3rd Edition and Monte Cook's vision for the game (most of us old-timers hated prestige classes, but they were easily ingnored). 3.5 muddied perfectly clear water and 4E shat in it. D20 was a triumph. Pathfinder's success and 4Es failure (it tanked) are evidence of that.

With regards to 5E... given that it looks like 5E is a bizarre attempt to play 'Windows Compatibility Mode' with all of the existing iterations of the rule set, it strikes me as especially difficult to implement for a computer game. And to follow the software analogy, 4E is widely accepted to be Vista. Folks flocked to Pathfinder.

Thanks, I seem to have figured it out by re-jigging the .exe app shortcut - I could run it fine from within the drive.

Hi My rig has two hard drives, the usual set-up where C is for essentials and D is where all my other stuff lives. When I installed Steam it defaulted to C and after a while about 40% of the memory of C was used up. Checking steam, I couldn't find a way for me to default it to d/l / install to D. So I just copied the Steam file in C and moved it to D. I can still open Steam but every time I boot it it d/ls new updates and thinks it's a new comp. It's driving me nuts. any ideas? I have to use the exe app from D, if I copy it to the desktop its FUBAR! Cheers MC

What's the plan for Dragon Age 3 btw?