Monte Carlo

Lego is awesome. always has been and always will be. This thread is all about posting links to awesome Lego kits and minifigs... for example I give you the Lego Strike Team from 'The Shield.'

No, DArK EpiC GNolLs.

Alpha Protocol. I'm playing a field agent with high Assault Rifle / Stealth / Sabotage. It's a great game, even if it is pretty fugly. Mike's boots look like something Zippo the Clown might wear. But I rather like the writing, the NPCs, missions and the general Tom Clancy feel of the game. The **** handler, Darcy, who seems to think he's in Team America World Police is very amusing.

Since the end of the Cold War a lot of UK defence planning has been predicated on expeditionary warfare, i.e. one air assault brigade and one commando brigade plus the rest of the army in it's conventional role with tanks, arty etc. The three tend to rotate around the scariest op commitments to train / rest / deploy in 6 month tours. Recent commitments have made the UK military adapt to fighting counter-insurgency and our piss-poor defence procurement has left us with a load of stuff that wasn't fit for purpose or will never arrive (FRES for example). Our Eurofighters were designed to fight MiGs, they won't have ground attack capability until 2018 FFS. Apache is in Afghanistan and was designed as a tank hunter, now they drop 100,000 grand of ordnance on three guys in a pickup. Our armour is being moth-balled in favour of vehicles suitable for COIN with greater IED survivability. So basically either our kit is designed for a war we are unlikely to ever fight or too focussed on the one we are in Afghanistan. There's no give. Our forces are very can-do. They'll do whatever is asked of them, whenever they're asked. The are quite literally awesome, they'd happily storm Tripoli running off of Ferries. But there's precious little capacity and resilience left. Our current government isn't covering itself in glory, rattling it's plastic sabre, but the real villains of the piece are the last lot.

LOL almost everything we've got is in the 'Stan. The defence review has FUBAR'd everything else.

but will it be epic suckage? HA! Good Fun! Or dark, epic suckage.

^ Interesting comments from the fans, even split between fanbois and folks complaining of nickel-and-dime tactics. Although top lulz for Bio claiming that a small piece of DLC is "epic." Epic has to be the most overused word at Bioware, I wonder if they have an epic coffee machine just outside Dave Gaider's epic office where an epic intern brings him epic Java as he sits in his epic Barcalounger

Grom, patronizing claptrap might satisfy your (increasingly dormant) inner-troll id... but the fact remains that designing a game via data-mining isn't likely to come up with something original or fun or absorbing. Lots of extremely complex things are satisfying, be it Mahler, a tricky piece of cooking, a glass of decent chateau-neuf de pape or a freaking Picasso. Yes, I'm turning into Niles from Frasier here but I want tactical, complicated, WTF gameplay not PRESS 'A' TO WIN. Thank you, a Moderately Educated Gamer.

^ It's about content. DLC = content. Mods = content. One is free, one ain't. That's where I'm coming from.

It's not a complaint, merely an observation. DA2 is the perfect storm of everything I hate in CRPGs: pre-determined characters, linear plots, actiony-combat with a fixed camera, freaking romances, fixed NPCs... As for the data feedback... what if the guys who quit the game after an hour just didn't like it? FFS, I don't like driving / racing games. If I quit Gran Turismo 120 after five minutes is that a reason for the developers to make all the gearboxes automatic and straighten out all those tricky 'S' bends? FFS.

:: shrugs :: Then it's all over for gamers who don't want to play lowest-common-denominator games I guess.

Top comment from NeoGaf:

No, I think a version of Das Boot where the crew are vampires (emo vampires who question the need to torpedo Allied shipping, naturally) might work better.

I've never played Mass Effect.

That picture of Mark Vanderloo drove me nuts in a "where do I know that guy from" kinda way. Then I realised that they obviously used him for one of the NWN1 character portaits, one of the fighter ones. I'm sure somebody here will see it too and post a linkie. There's also Katherine Zeta Jones, Angelina Jolie and Raph Fiennes lookalike portraits in NWN1 ports if you look close enough.

Eastern Promises is good. Not awesome, but solid and Viggo turns in an excellent, nuanced performance. His Navy dude in GI Jane was the best thing about the movie, period. It was a diamond in the rough.

I think Slowtrain's point about the increasingly hectic number of releases degrading games longevity is pretty important. I'm still left wondering why, in the current climate of rampant DLC / micro-transactional content, how releasing a toolset or encouraging modding is in anyway of benefit to the developer or publisher. I'm just saying that I suspect that modding has had it's golden age and will go back to what it was, a niche hardcore type of activity.

I think it's fair to say that a big part of the CRPG scene for the past ten years has been modding and, latterly, toolsets. I had high hopes for Dragon Age: Origins in this respect, but the modding scene has been uninspiring compared to many other games. Thinking about this, it seems clear to me that DLC and modding are clearly at variance... why encourage folks to make stuff you could make them pay for? What do you guys think, are modding and toolsets as dead as old-skool tactical gameplay and party-based games?

Yes, that forward-roll thing he's got going on made me LOL. As did the monster that looked like a giant killer artichoke at 4.30, that along with the 'Wyld Stallyns' style muscle-rock made this look like the CRPG version of Spinal Tap.

Desert Island Discs is a classic radio programme here in the UK, on BBC Radio 4. It's very simple. You are marooned on a desert island. You are allowed to bring eight pieces of music with you to play on a notionally magical device of some description, plus a luxury item. Interesting and / or well-known people come onto the show and explain why song 'A' or piece of music 'Y' is so important and makes it onto the island. So here we go, please post your eight pieces of desert island music with as much or as little explanation as you wish for it's inclusion. Luxury item optional. Cheers MC

Try it. Just the once. Then there's no going back.

I suffered a similar problem, until I discovered Just for Men. Since a friend recommended this product to me I spend an inordinate amount of time fighting off attractive single women. When combined with a splash of Sex Panther by Odeon (its got bits of real panther in it) I am literally a lurve leviathan. I'm not sure that's going to help you buy a quality used automobile though.

Just watched England beat France in the Six Nations. Next up is Scotland in two weeks, and they will play like a Tasmanian Devil on LSD to try to deny us the Grand Slam.

Like I said before, I so badly want to love Arma2 but there are too many controls.

Until of course they become fashionable again, the hubris in this statement is breath-taking (we're not making them so they are over). Bio has been on this course for several years, the volte face from the traditional elements of DA:O I guess is a legacy of the epic development cycle.