Monte Carlo

"Framed Narrative Structure" translates into "You are now an NPC in our virtual novel, occasionally we'll let you fight a battle."

Seriously, though, for the same reason I don't like iTunes. It's clunky, invasive and the principle of it irks me.

Because the government uses Steam to send out brain-control rays. Before that it was the black helicopters.

Although I fully agree with the concept of Caveat Emptor, there is one exception. WHEN A GAME ONLY MENTIONS MANDATORY STEAM INSTALLATION IN TINY LETTERS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BOX UNDER THE SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS. I have a whole weekend free. To myself. To a married man with kids this is a rare treat. So I buy Sniper: Shadow Warrior and a significant quantity of beer and peruse the Dominoes Pizza menu. Then I realise that this game needs Steam to work. I will not have Steam on my computer. Empires:TW had mandatory Steam. Fine, it said so on the box. So I didn't buy it. This game, which admittedly bought in a hurry, does. My bad. Luckily I know the store will exchange it. So, can somebody tell me, why are some games Steam Only?

The only movie I'm really excited about at the moment is The Expendables.

Maybe the hero should be called Tony Hawke, he could have adventures on a Dragonbone skateboard.

I've never really bought into the whole social networking thing apart from perhaps posting here. The revelation that the folks behind Facebook and Google were, after all, rapacious capitalists isn't surprising. They might work in futuristic bubble-offices serving free macrobiotic mung-bean smoothies whilst having brilliant ideas during unicycle sessions... but they still want to sell your personal data to whoever is prepared to pay for it. One day we'll all laugh at the notion that Google was a benevolent entity.

^ Maybe that's the issue - it didn't nail the genre and missed the point of the source material. Edge of Darkness was a cult 1980's political thriller on the TV here, it's very good. Definitely not noir, political conspiracy stuff.

My pet hate is pre-determined characters, so that's another tick in the Not Impressed column. This sounds to me like a cross between an ARPG and Fable. It will have a veneer of emo BS in the shape of rambling fakespeare cutscenes and RoManCEs FoR DArk HERoic FanTASy! I liked DA1 because it was old-skool enough to still feel like a CRPG, this is obviously a design decision away from that. I can't get excited about it, the childish concept art is unimpressive and the general premise (refugee from the Blight becomes supreme overlord) is just one cliche away from Farmboy Saves The World. Of course, like last time, the hype and puerile marketing will obfuscare anything genuinely cool about the game but this gamer can't get excited about it and I won't be following it.

Really? I thought it was awful. Revenge thrillers should be visceral and sharp - for all their faults Taken and Man on Fire are examples of the genre worth watching. Edge of Darkness, like State of Play, are both British BBC TV political thrillers. State of Play ran with the ball and was excellent, I'm afraid I can't day the same of Edge. And, much as I like Ray Winstone I struggled to picture him as an East London boy-turned-CIA covert operative. Mel Gibson was one-dimensional and... meh. By the time the movie warmed up it was almost over, and the neo-con, greedy corporate villain was mono-dimensional. Or maybe I'm just thinking about it too much. It's a genre I really like, so I was disappointed. Gibson, after all, is the man who brought us Apocalypto and therefore deserves to be taken seriously. He can do better than this.

The taxation on weed will be so punitive that criminals will still smuggle it, the same way they do with tobacco. Not that I'm saying that it's a reason to keep it illegal, it just adds another POV to the prohibition argument.

This thread is freaking hilarious, a petri dish of stupidity.

^ So establishing someone's right to be in the country legitimately is discrimination? Thanks for proving the old saw that 'A liberal is a person who's so open minded his brain fell out.' The issue is how the law is conducted. Cops / immigration people doing it professionally and politely means no problem, as I said in the other thread I've been stopped by US border cops and they were very professional and polite. Shame their colleagues at US airports don't have the same training, but that's another story.

Snakes on a Plane. It's so awful it's good. Now I have to wonder if it's a post modern attempt to make a movie so awful-it's-good.

Yes, I do admire the man who industrialized the Soviet Union and lead it against the Nazis. Certainly the Great Purge was overzealous, but the net effect of Stalin was the defeat of the Nazi menace, a monstrosity far greater and more terrible than the Great Purge. I'll remind you that in four short years the Nazis killed over twenty million Soviet citizens, and they would have done far, far more if they'd had the opportunity. Stalin (alongside the Soviet peoples, of course) denied them that opportunity. It had its price, greater than it needed to be, but "Stalinism" was a net good for the world. Which is why you are best ignored.

LOL coming from an admirer of Stalin.

I think a thread about the future of shared bathroom facilities would be made of pure 24 carat win, Wals. I don't know if you've ever been to the McDonald's at Charing Cross, near Villier's Street (slap bang in the middle of central London) but that has (gasp) shared bathroom facilities of the type you describe.

"What did the Romans ever do for us?"

Good luck to Germany, after a mixed start their young, adventurous team is becoming fun to watch. If they win it will be well-deserved.

double post

I'm not sure about that, not being demanding but I'd like to see a Home Office or SOCA paper making the link. Illegal immigration in the UK is about access to jobs, benefits and services, with a nasty but not insignificant undertone of sexual exploitation, depending on where the people are being trafficked from. Furthermore, the crucial difference between immigration and asylum isn't made. I don't see where drugs come into it. I know (and rather like) lots of Polish people; their diaspora wasn't fuelled by drugs, it was fuelled by prosperity and they've come here completely legitimately as EU citizens. They do like a drink, like I said I rather like them. This doesn't mean that I think that social cohesion is helped by the schools in southern England having a large proportion of foreign-speaking pupils. Our problems remain over-generous benefits and a lack of a border police service. The economic armageddon in public spending in the UK means that benefits will be cut and the Govt. is setting up a border police. This will still be hampered by the ghost in the machine - political correctness. Google 'Common Purpose' every senior public sector manager goes on their networking sessions and they are secretive about what their agenda is. That's enough about the UK. Hurlie, your 'let's treat the big problem' is great, but its only a part of the issue. You are talking about strategy, i.e. fixing a failed narco-state. Folks on the ground are thinking more tactically and who can blame them. Part of the problem is, again, political correctness and the self-loathing of the left. Once upon a time the huddled masses at Ellis Island proudly declared their new identity as Americans while acknowledging their past. Now, you get the impression that being American is a sort of bolt-on to your original identity, even though you've sworn the oath or even worse haven't and are just camping out there using the services and giving nothing back. So please, drawing a distinction between the macro and micro problem is misleading. If I lived in Arizona I'd be in my pick-up, holding the line with the other concerned people. Not because I'm a xenophobe but because when the government lets you down so egregriously rolling onto your back seems like a pretty crappy option.

Hurlie, your position doesn't seem to take into account the core issue about immigration, which is resources. the Left love to dress up the issue as being about race (which is a factor, I'll grant you, but not the issue). US taxpayers fund infrastructure. Illegal immigrants use that infrastructure. They are X and Y axis, when the people using the infrastructure outstrip capacity you get problems. When you get fully socialised health care and a centre-left government your next problem will be health tourism (which is a problem here). When you point it out you will be accused of being a racist. Western liberal democracies are dying not with a bang, but with a whimper, manipulated by Frankfurt school Marxism on the one hand and ignored by rapacious casino-capitalists on the other.

Re-reading Bomber by Len Deighton for the tenth or so time. I'm not being hyperbolic when I suggest it's one of the best war novels ever written. I can't believe it spawned Memphis Bell which while an OK-ish type of movie, dancing perilously on the borders of Meh, it doesn't reflect the brilliance of the novel (about incidentally, a RAF bomber crew - they'd only make a movie about an American one which I suppose gave them the plot-crucial opportunity for Harry Connick Jnr to play the piano). Deighton's novel shows us the consequences of a bombing raid on a small German town in the summer of 1943, through the eyes of the German civilians, a luftwaffe radar controller and the crew of a RAF bomber. The aerial war over Europe isn't exactly an area of WW2 that I'm overly interested in, but the power of the narrative and Deighton's eye for detail grab me in a way few of his other novels have (and he is a fine author). Highly recommended to fellow forumites.

You need to penalise people who hire illegals. Like, lock them up for two years sort of penalties. The parasites who help smuggle refugees? These guys are usually linked to organised crime and they need locking up. Say for ten. Illegals? Rapid deportation, polite, efficient, fast. Take their DNA and politely explain that if they return again they will get a lifetime ban from the USA, a prison sentence then deport them. I've been to Mexico, Arizona, California and Texas. Juarez, El Paso and Tijuana. I think the border controls are impressive, Juarez reminded me of Berlin in 1985 with the chicanes and barbed wire and motion sensors. In two weeks driving through the Big Bend I was stopped by avacado-coloured immigration patrol cars by polite men (many, incidentally, of Latino origin) with guns who searched the boot of my hire car. This would be 1998. I don't know if this is all still in place, but it's not like the border is ignored. Obama is claiming to get on top of this, but it's all aimed at November, triangulation and Chicago-skool BS. If governments don't deal with the properly fairly and sensitively then you get laws like the ones Arizona is passing, and vigilantism. And I can't say I blame them.

^ My apologies, now I have a problem too.