Monte Carlo

^ 'K thanks. That makes sense now.

OK, I've not read the books so I don't have that baggage... ... but I rather liked it. OK, it's Dynasty with greatswords, incest and leather armour but it's fun nonetheless. The bad guy with the blonde hair who pimped his sister to the barbarians was great. Sean Bean played a great Sean Bean if you get my drift. The Dwarf was fun in a randy-dwarf kinda way. The big fat king was cool. The baby wolflets were cute. A question, though... when Queen SeanBean (see how I got all these names lodged in my memory?) gets the message from her sister who does she allege murdered Big Fat King's right hand man? Was it his Queen, the one getting seen to by her handsome blonde brother? Or is it the blonde wierdos hanging out with the barbarians? One thing it does have in common with Rome though... magnificent opening credits, loved the little mechanical whatsits on the map, really well done and gave a sense of geography and place. Monte gives it a solid 7/10 and imagines he'll be getting into it in a big way.

I don't know because I have LoF and Vol on ignore, I only checked in to see some hot elf chicks.

FO:NV Medieval Total War 2 (Custom Campaign mod) The Witcher That is all.

There's a Lawful Evil dwarf dude in Beregost, he's OK and of course there's Shar-Teel the crazy CE fighter up near the basilisks in the NE wilderness region. Adjantis the paladin is crap, I agree, as is Jaheira and her husband both of whom were stripped naked and sent ogre hunting whenever I played BG1. My party was invariably my fighter/thief, Imoen d/c to mage, Minsc, Coran (on more or less pure archer duty because BG1 archery is sick) and the Viking cleric chick, was it Branwen? You can also make a pretty good fun evil party too.

Says the guy from the nation that gaves us Herr Fritzl.

^ K, thx. What happened, did the national elf design council announce it. I can't remember what was happening in 2003, but surely I'd have noticed. Anyhow, it's silly. Bring back normal old fashioned pointy-but-flushed to the side of the head elf ears FFS.

Have only skim-read this, so is that prototype Nazi bankers come from space and like ice cream? Right?

The bot is a really great movie critic.

I could tell you that [all - (typical one in a thousand)] = most, but I think you know that as well as I do. That said, I'll agree that most females, I think I'll even go so far as to say most people, aren't going to emulate cartoonish fantasy characters under normal circumstances due to the utter impracticality of such outfits. And have a rather more archetypical fantasy render: At what point, by Thor's Beard, did elves develop horizontal ears?

^ Possibly. Add to that the fact that consoles have peaked performance-wise for the next three or four years. PC gamers benefit from that and a good CRPG manifestly doesn't need to be a systems hawg to look and feel good. I've posted here before that the future for good, new-old-skool CRPGs might well mirror the thriving and profitable (albeit smaller-scale) computer war games market (check out Matrix Games if you don't believe me). The first generation of elite modders are now in the position to get involved if they choose not to go mainstream. Plus, as I said to Boo earlier, bigger dev houses (and indeed I include Obsidian in this) are still making interesting, different and rewarding CRPGs (I would put both AP and FO:NV in this category).

Where's mudeater land?

August? WTF? Why does Sweden get movies so late?

Boo, the wheel turns and we are at the crappy end of that CRPG-wise. Just sit out and wait for the next full revolution. The good news is that CRPGs at the more modest end of the scale can still be good. Take two different ends of the spectrum like Torchlight (H&S) and Escalon (utter old-skool). You still have high-end stuff like Bethseda and CDProjeckt too. The glass is half-full, not half-empty. As Bio goes in it's own direction towards a new, very different and mainstream CRPG market you have to see the classic equal and opposite reaction elsewhere. Because Bio's new direction is so freaking lame, so freaking vanilla, so utterly devoid of soul the reaction to it is probably going to be awesome and we can't predict what it might be. So chill.

So, this game is a piece of pernicious watermelon propaganda that endorses bogus Malthusian ideas and generally encourages the humans-as-parasites-on-Gaia myth?

I'm not being obtuse, Boo, because I think we are generally in agreement on these issues, but you are mistaken here IMO. Bio are simply riding the commercial wave and shoe-horning their games into the format that makes them more money, after all they are a business not a charity for niche gamers. Forget them, support indie developers and look elsewhere. Take heart that Bio will eventually be shat out of the end of the EA digestive tract like those who went before, Greg & Ray have made their (seriously, much-deserved) fortunes. Bioware's legacy won't be what they did at the end of their existence as a developer, it will be what they did originally, which deserves respect. But right now? Forget it.

I have stared death in the face and won. The end result (Friday afternoon until now) was a slab of strong-ish (5.5%) Belgian beer, i.e. 16 500 ml cans, 4 bottles of half-decent red wine and three or four (I'm sure you'll forgive the memory problem) cheeky cognacs. I also smoked three Romeo Y Julietta No. 2s, having run out of Bolivars. I also irritated Krezack, a karmic reward if there ever was one (awww, Krezzie!). I feel great. I was a bit fuzzy this morning but nothing some bacon, eggs and cognac couldn't sort out. My wife was away visiting family and arrived home to learn of my heroism: she is extremely proud. I am now on the 5th bottle of claret although I am going to skip booze entirely for the next twelve hours to de-tox. The only casualty was that I was so drunk I watched Legion on the TV, please see my drunken review on the movie thread. Ha! Reaper! Screw you! Cheers MC

The problem is (a) the end of no-win-no-fee and (b) it's a criminal, not civil prosecution. But I'm sure there's a firebrand lawyer out there with some fire in his or her belly.

The weather is unseasonably warm in the UK this weekend so I am off to the pub with my family, after which I am inviting a friend over and firing up my BBQ. Have popped open the first beer of the day, as per our WWOT forum's titanic struggle against Death. Yum. Heroism was never this much fun.

I love TW but gave up when they released Empires (I find the period a bit meh), and as I'm not a fan of the Shogun setting either I doubt that I'll be getting this one either. MTW2 is now at the pinnacle of modding awe, I play that a helluva lot, it's still a fabulous game.

... I'm pretty sure that generally reports of numbers are "x shipped", but I've never seen "x sold" mean anything else than "x sold". Because that would be kind of serious case of misleading by a listed company. I mean, the two can get confused when laymen come here with their numbers, but if the company is saying "x sold", then it sure as hell should be "x sold"! IIRC the newspaper industry (dead tree) has always operated like this in terms of circulation.

Krezack: Because someone, somewhere, might be enjoying themselves. Haunt another thread, miserabilist.

MORALE VAMPIRE ALERT!

I think the best way forward is to relax and wait for EA's own figures, after their digital, GotY and DA2: Gold (etc etc) editions are done. The successful lifespan of a game nowadays moves beyond the first heady quarter after release. DA2 wil have sold well across all platforms and be commercially successful, it's a given. The economic environment is tough, games are luxury products, Bio have done well with what is by any objective standard a controversial product. So chill.

Wish I'd known about that one, I'd have played it at my wedding