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Monte Carlo

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Everything posted by Monte Carlo

  1. Make a plan. Prosecute it violently. Do it today. General Douglas MacArthur.
  2. Jean Cretien, PM of Canada who helped pull them out of their own financial tsunami in the 90's: The worst enemies of Capitalism are capitalists: they can never be rich enough. Note: Monte is a centre-right free-marketeer with libertarian instincts, yet I find this statement strangely compelling.
  3. I want to be Lawful Evil and armed with a scythe whilst wearing one of those groovy ToEE coolie hats.
  4. A shame that the movie ruins any subsequent read of the book, which is v good.
  5. Can you eat them? They probably need slow-cooking, but I reckon with some onions, garlic and wine they'd be groovy.
  6. You realise that grognard is a badge I wear with considerable pride, whelp?
  7. I note with interest that people are voting for ToEE 'because they haven't played it.' Which is groovy for 'game club' but not the type of thing Tigs is doing, where familiarity is all part of the fun. Secondly, ToEE is utterly faithful to the module --- a massive push of the FAIL BUTTON because the module is a shell designed for the DM to flesh out. Something Troika in it's death throes was clearly unwilling to do. It's turn-based Diablo. It's American football without the ball. It's Doom without the shotgun. Don't get me wrong, ToEE's engine and graphics are the best and most faithful adaptation of pen and paper D&D ever adapted for the PC. But the game itself sucks. VO, portraits, music... awful. I voted IWD2 and implore others to do so. Vote IWD2. Vote returning frost dart.
  8. IWD2, honestly, just to keep the theme going and for the returning frost dart lulz.
  9. For now. Add India in the mid-21st century for good measure, although I suspect the USA is canny enough to make them a special ally. Full spectrum dominance isn't a game whereby you accept that your power has parity with 'X' 'Y' or 'Z'. You either have full spectrum dominance or you don't. US global power is entirely predicated on your Carrier Groups, you are precisely where the Royal Navy was circa 1900. Being a global superpower is tough. You have to explain to an unemployed single mom in Somewhere, Ohio, that her tax dollar is crucial in ensuring the free world prospers. It sucks. The alternative is worse. You need to make Europe pay for her defence, to make her create her own version of full spectrum dominance that augments, not challenges, your own. Problem is Europe remains an aspiration in defence terms and your nearest ally with any significant military capability (Britain) is broke and Mr. Obama clearly doesn't like us very much. So your bulk buying of tinned goods, Night Vision Goggles and .338 FMJ rounds is probably not as moonbat crazy as it was twenty years ago My tip? Buy three more of those carrier groups and park two off of the Gulf of Mexico.
  10. A good point, and although I'm not that familiar with the technology can you tell? Because that would be lame.
  11. In a bizarre inversion of 'video killed the radio star' 4E D&D was the first pen and paper RPG to actually copy computer game (specifically MMORPG) style mechanics to attract da kidz to tabletop gaming. Killing the game in a collapsing, blazing black hole of contradictory nothingness as a result.
  12. Company of Heroes Online Beta, still. Wow, it's amazing playing different gamers. One minute you're on top of the world, an unstoppable leviathan of fiery destruction. The next you are getting pwned by a guy who knows how to use a sniper and a MG and holds up your entire advance because you can't capture one freaking fuel point. This is a very polished product. And it's free when it's released next month. And, no, I don't work for them.
  13. Bioware's pedigree is impressive, even I will admit that. But it is Starbucks. It will have it's Starbucks moment, and if it is clever enough it will ride it out.
  14. I think you've hit my nail on the head. Ashdown was precisely the sort of supremo (q.v. Gerard Templar in Malaya) required. Send him to the 'Stan forthwith and give him some clout. The pity is, and I'm genuinely not being chippy about the Yanks, the US foreign policy machine consists of almost nothing but careerists you are rightly leery of. Iraq proved that US civilian administrators are NOT match-fit. You'd need an ex-military man, as the US armed services has thrown up a generation of thoughtful, imaginative generals whjo might be ideal for the role. QED. . Agreed, boychick See? We agreed all along.
  15. This is the most powerful argument for rationale behind the Arizonan legislation. It's reasonable. It's why liberals deliberately ignore it.
  16. I just decided, inspired by Tigranes, that I could save myself forty quid by playing IWD instead. And have more fun.
  17. My character is nails. Take off his armour Tigs, just do it, he's so Tunnel-Fightier it won't make any difference. And arm him with a club. A non-magical one. Mwuahahahahahaaaa.
  18. You are correct, utterly, in conflating the issues of the War (capital 'W' deliberate) with the political dimension in Europe. We now have (a) a large Muslim population in Europe who have every right to be cautious about military action and (b) a growing sense of discontent with multiculturalism, which even significant voices on the political left suggest isn't working quite how they envisaged it. Every round fired in Helmand (etc) has a potential political impact in London and Amsterdam and Paris. Modern European Islam needs nuturing as a natural buffer against it's less enlightened cousin. We aren't doing that. We also need to get uncompromisingly tough with Pakistan, a nuclear armed military dictatorship that can barely feed it's people or manage natural disasters but can plot relentlessly and ingeniously it's nearest democratic neighbour like a silent movie villain tying a girl to the railway track. Much of the threat is the ISI's glove puppet, and it needs to be ripped off. My view is that the growth of violent, politicized Islam is one of the first big ripples hitting us from the collapse of the Soviet Union. And we have to ride it, not try and build impregnable flood defences doomed to be swamped. The way to do that, in an era of 24 hour news media, the internet, asymmetric warfare and politically balkanized populations in Western democracies is not War. By War I mean tanks and airborne brigades and objectives and body counts. I do like my history, and I often think "what would a colonial administrator in Trans-Jordan do in 1920?" OK, his first move would probably be to send over some bombers to drop poison gas followed by a squadron of Rolls Royce armoured cars to shoot up what was left. But, triteness aside, these would have been the bluntest of instruments in a very large tool box full of other, more precise, devices. He would have known all the players, personally. Spoken the language. Lived in the region. Set up and administered everything that actually worked. I know imperialism is a dirty word, but the alternative in the 21st century seems to be either 'peacekeepers' cowering in barracks whilst mass rapes and genocide takes place or keeping Scandie aid workers in tax free salaries and brand new SUVs. Or, now, alientating the adherents of one of the world's great religions by fighting bloody great wars with no discernible big picture objectives. So what do we do? Big carrots, big sticks. Go seriously Mossad on the bad boys. Nurture moderate Islam. Woo Turkey. Manage Pakistan. Be pragmatic about immigration and cultural and social cohesion without being racist or exclusionary. Give the Afghans an option - do you want us to fix this place or don't you? If you do then we need to run it for you for a while, but not with Karzai. But if you invite the Taliban back then there will be consequences. None of these things are especially radical, but they're not happening.
  19. An update. The infinity engine games look and play beautifully on this rig, which says more about Windows 7 as an OS than Alienware I guess. Nonetheless, for me it's good to have a machine that loves old games, some of my favourites are pretty creaky now. I'll be putting JA2 on it soon. Company of Heroes was great. Now it isn't. I'm getting like 4.5 FPS. It sucks. So I've installed FO3 and Men of War to see if it's the machine of CoH. No real problems with either, MoW has a helluva lot going on but runs beautifully, the only performance compromise was for me to switch down to the middle shadow setting (big deal). With a few minor performance tweaks FO3 is very nice. On a 15" laptop. It might be that I can't update CoH on my machine, for some reason the auto-updater won't work so I'm a bit bummed because it's one of my fave games. No biggie, though, seeing as it's going to be free imminently as CoHO so I'll just download it then. Cheers MC
  20. This is why the US edumacation system is inherently superior to ours. It also explains the historical accuracy of movies such as U-51 and The Patriot.
  21. Mwuahahahaha. I am the most tunnel-fightiest tunnel fighter evar.
  22. Parallels with 1973 abound - America was in the grip of an unpopular war and under tricky Dicky conspiracy theories abounded. Nonetheless, it sorta ruined it for me.
  23. Just had a look at the CE and, for once, it's a CE worth forking out the extra money for. Especially the graphic novel. I'm quite looking forward to this one, along with DS3 Obs are back in the saddle as far as I'm concerned.
  24. Children are our future, which is why this week I began to teach my five-year-old about Chuck Norris. At school he is learning rudimentary maths, how to read and write and also how to make animals from papier mache. The teachers, as far as I can work out, are doing an excellent job. The child is well-adjusted, happy and has lots of friends. He looks forward to going to school. But he has been taught absolutely nothing about Chuck Norris. It irks me. Chuck isn't even on the National Cirriculum. I must admit there have been a number of challenges. For example, there's no way as a responsible parent I'm going to teach my toddler what a round-house kick is. And he's far too young for Delta Force. So I had to limit his early stages as a Chuck Padawan to (a) explaining what a Texas Ranger is and (b) showing him a picture of Chuck wielding two mini-Uzis whilst wearing a denim shirt with the arms ripped off. He didn't find that too cool for some reason, but it's early days. However, the joke that 'When Chuck Norris was born he drove his mom home from the hospital' got a laugh and I've told him to tell the teacher the gag so she can understand the pivotal importance of Chuck in modern education. If only there was an animated Chuck Norris TV programme or DS game, then my work would be done.
  25. Going to see The Expendables in on my 'Must Do' list for this week. I am giddy excited about it, am pleased to hear the positive feedback on this thread.
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