Monte Carlo

What a bizarre marketing strategy. They are a brilliant resource though, which is why I suspect they'll be forgiven.

I have some friends who are into WoW, and trust me you'd need a nuke to separate them from it. It's scary. And it's not like they are gamers. By that, I mean that prior to WoW they weren't really into games and apart from WoW they're not really into anything else (not that they'd have the time given their MMO fetish). I've seen it being played and the appeal escapes me. Online RTS, where you can play missions for a couple of hours then not worry about it for a week, are more my thing and I suspect the majority of other gamers.

+1, Buscemi has turned into one of the best character actors of his generation and lights up everything he appears in. He's up there, almost, with William H. Macy.

[big confession]I never worked out the lockpicking minigame in FO3. I hated it. With a fiery passion. Why can't I just dump points into lock pick.... and pick locks.[/big confession] And how about an options tab that says "Lockpick Lite" or "Lockpick Minigame"?

Don't tell him your name, Pike!

^ I can't let it go, there are a lot of seriously bright people in the military despite popular misconceptions to the contrary. The Team America tendency in the Bush Whitehouse merely compounded the lazy, flabby errors and indifference of the Clinton years.

^ Do you honestly think that there is a coherent 'Right Wing' in the first place? It's about as useful as saying that the 'Progressive' (LOL) Left believes in nothing but statist solutions, nationalisation, punitive taxation and creating client voting groups to be bribed with taxpayer's hard-earned money. Because the left is bigger and more diverse than that to the factor of a hundred, and so is 'the Right Wing.' You'd be laughed out of a politics class. Are you an economist, perchance?

After a lengthy pen and paper gaming interegnum, and having read the fundamental wisdom of the game design ethos, it might be time for me to crack open my box of polyhedral dice after all.

I usually follow the sage advice a la Dr. Wals and it works a treat.

You post 'hard facts' from a partisan political website to bait the right-of-centre forumites then get all pissy when somebody makes a joke? Gimme a break.

That was Channel 4, a non-licence payer funded, commercial, 'version' of the BBC and where I think public service broadcasting should be.

+1. I vote for Hackmaster, oh yes!

89.7% of all statistics are made up.

Hmmm, if you don't mind me saying so Wrath, that's a bit of a lawyer's answer. It matters not what the mission is sold as, the brains should be saying... "look we are gonna be doing a lot of fighting in failed states. Our light armour solutions are sub-optimal because peace-keeping RoEs forbid us sending in an armoured cavalry regiment. So we need up-armoured light vehicles." This isn't armchair general stuff, serving friends agree with my basic argument and the UK has made the same mistakes. Of course, up until the mid 2000s even the US army sees itself as a war-fighting leviathan, not a girly peace-keeping force following COIN doctrine, happily that has changed to the point where the US Army is pre-eminent in the field. Lots of people died getting there, though, and many of them were in crap soft-skinned vehicles even when the writing was on the wall in the mid 1990s.

America does awesome TV, the consistency is there time and time again across all genres. I have loved Frasier, Dexter, The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Two and a Half Men, Band of Brothers and even more mainstream stuff like NCIS and The Shield. BBC does awesome TV.... occasionally. Although The Thick of It isn't really for me it is critically acclaimed, but stuff like this comes across once in a while. Not all the time. A lot of BBC comedy is dreck. I'd get rid of the BBC tomorrow, but that's an entirely different argument and my POV isn't mainstream in the UK.

The military was build to fight the Soviet Union, the Humvees were never meant to be on the front lines, the problem is with counter insurgency everything is a front line. The Cold War ended in 1989 when everyone was seriously digging Francis Fukuyama. 2003 was a long, long way off. No excuses there, I'm afraid. When did Stryker come online, and your Marine corps has had LAVs since the 80's IIRC. And they still got it wrong. Let me get my position clear: I supported the Iraq war until I discovered the absolutely shabby, arrogance-laden lack of planning by the Bush administration. No one expected 9/11 though, so there was no clear idea what the next war would look like. Unarmored Humvees weren't a problem during the first Iraq war. I'd have thought that after the Somalian debacle in the early 1990's some propeller-head at the Pentagon would have done some environmental scanning and worked it out. Apparently not.

I'd completely forgotten the Time Stasis Level, which I hated. But I'd forgotten how otherwise awesome IWD2 is.

trust me, its not very exciting in real life. It would be cool if you charged an exorbitant, made-up-off-the-top-of-your-head rate for every hour you played the game

The military was build to fight the Soviet Union, the Humvees were never meant to be on the front lines, the problem is with counter insurgency everything is a front line. The Cold War ended in 1989 when everyone was seriously digging Francis Fukuyama. 2003 was a long, long way off. No excuses there, I'm afraid. When did Stryker come online, and your Marine corps has had LAVs since the 80's IIRC. And they still got it wrong. Let me get my position clear: I supported the Iraq war until I discovered the absolutely shabby, arrogance-laden lack of planning by the Bush administration.

No tunnels? I'M OUT!

Just finished watching Dragon's Den. I think the programme started in Japan, and I don't know if you have it in the US or elsewhere but the deal is this... In an old warehouse, five pantomime uber-capitalists sit in big leather chairs surrounded by, literally, piles of cash. A hapless business person wanders up the stairs and asks for their money in return for a pitifully optimistic share in their company. Like panning for gold, there are squillions of utterly rubbish pitches then one that is a gem. It's the X-Factor for reasonably intelligent people. Here's the deal. All of us are Dragons. We all have half a million Obz Dollars, an exciting new notional currency that I have invented for this thread. Anybody can pitch their idea to us and we will then rip it apart like ravenous were-sharks fed a juicy steak. Then we will either invest or not invest. If you don't want to invest just say "I'm OUT!" and give a condescending reason why, for optimal realism. Games-related pitches are obviously sought, but hey it's a daft thread on the internet so other wacky business ideas are also welcome as long as you aren't Interplay (lulz). Like, for example, an MMORPG based on cheese or a Wii game about seeing how long you can stay completely still (Death Simulator Legend 3000). Cheers MC

The is a serious escalation of awesomeness in this thread, I particularly like the guy at the front's Were-Paw. Graraaahhhllll!

Those guys are awesome.

Put people from all over the world in a wet, over-crowded island. Add the world's most globalized city. Then sprinkle an eccentric tradition of avant garde artistic endeavour over the top and give it a good stir.

DA's combat is good, but some attacks were designed for spamming and the phasing / synching of attacks baffles me a bit. The 2-H weapon style guy needs a lot of micro-ing in combat whereas your slice-em-and-dice em dual wielder doesn't. But there were lots of tunnels to fight in which was generally awesome.