Monte Carlo

Thor. Amusing popcorn movie. Asgard looked incredible.

Amazon is a five hundred pound gorilla, the Google of publishing / e-books. Apple is the axis of tech-evil. What did you expect. An e-book is almost as expensive as a physical copy with hardly any of the overhead costs. The reader is getting screwed as are writers. The winners are (quel surprise) apple and Amazon.

Yeah, Dungeon Keeper is doing it for me.

I have two novels on submission with commissioning editors and an agent eyeing his fifteen percent. You can be sniffy about commercially successful fiction, but my experience is that for every awful teen vampire romance novel there's another tautly-plotted thriller. So for me it's not a bad metric of whether a book is 'good' or not. Of course, e-books have shaken things up so the niche now gets a fair crack of the whip. As for good stories with so-so characters I give you Frederick Forsyth of The Dogs of War and Day of the Jackal fame. Forsyth, by his own admission, makes his characters fairly sketchy (in of itself an interesting idea, allowing the reader to project into the character) but makes up for it with excellent, well-paced plotting and mastery of technical detail. Not everybody's cup of tea but his stuff is a good read. I could name others.

Do you mean in games or in fiction generally? In fiction generally I'd disagree, some writers get away with being plot-heavy and relatively character lite and sell lots of books. And vice versa. In a video game I'm looking for gameplay first and foremost, that's the skeleton (incidentally combat is part of that but then again it could be an economics / resource type game or something completely different, as long as the way that mechanic is delivered is fun). The rest is the stuff draped around it to make it look nice. Which is why me and Bio are never going to get along ever again because I'd argue that they're not really making games anymore. They've created a new type of interactive story hybrid. Good luck to them.

Custom skins and items are a massive part of PC games - look at the amount of mods and paid-for DLC that provides it from RTS games to RPGs. Games are obviously very visual - being able to customise how different / cool / whatever that part of it is unsurpisingly going to be important to a lot of players. That's a part of it, add to it a meaningful gameplay mechanic (i.e. different stuff does different things) then it's a win-win. I'm actually amazed that this even comes up as an issue - it's a given to me. Bio wants to railroad you in every way, remember the writer who wanted the player to be able to skip combat so you could enjoy her next beautifully scripted cut-scene? The control freakery they display is funny really. And another reason why I haven't bought anything they've done since DA:O (and before that NWN).

I remember in the old pen and paper D&D rules magic armour expanded or contracted er, magically, to fit the wearer.

That works. Some people would hate the micro, but I like it.

Company of Heroes (duh). Mainly the Modern Combat and Eastern Front mods (both are great). Tried the Kingdoms of Amalur demo and found it to be meh. Reminded me of Rift. That's it. Am waiting for Diablo 3 TBH.

Bioware have always been over-confident of their writing and plotting. Which is at best so-so. That such basic stuff as the Big Three points identified even need to be reiterated just shows you the head-up-arse world that Bio devs now live in.

Yeah it could be pretty bad (cough FIREWINE cough) and got worse the bigger your party was. The twisty under-city dungeon in BG itself, towards the end of the game, was awful.

I'm really interested but the ability to mod it is a bit of a deal-breaker for me.

I swore never to comment on Dragon age again but when I saw that audience.... bwahahahhahaaaa!!!

This is like watching Dali. It's beautiful.

I play lots of CoH online with Americans but, yes, mainly at weekends. But let's face it, it's Diablo 3. Time zones will become immaterial. Wives will become fractious. Bosses will look at their watches and wonder where we are.

I wonder if the enhanced edition can be modded?

^ You know that it's going to be mind-blowing and that you will get through ten mice playing it.

Yeah but I play wearing a Dennis-Hopper in 'Blue Velvet' style oxygen mask. Hold that thought.

Hi Sorry I haven't been around for a while, had lots of R/L stuff to be getting on with. D3 is out 15th May. If anybody wants to co-op for hours on end while drinking beer and giggling lots then sign-up here with battle.net details etc. Cheers MC

Please don't say that again. Not even in jest. It's not funny.

I one-shotted the Tarresque with quivering palm, I've got a screenie of it. Honest.

I have been one of Dave's biggest critics but his BG2 mods were great.

Thanks, on the website it suggests OSX only.

Sorry if I haven't been paying attention, but is this going to be available on the PC as well as ipad?

I'd buy a Dragon Age Real-Time Strategy game with a 'Hawke Barracks' where you could just Hawke-Rush the enemy base. You would of course have Romance Upgrades too.