Monte Carlo

Genius! New thread ahoy.

Still got a big ol' bag of hate for it. Unless... yeah, a multi-player co-op / online game where your team researches / explores and you go on mass squad raid missions... that might work. Basically a very big L4D with a nifty research overlay. But you know you are going to get a generic FPS with some alleged 'old-skool' credibility.

Studied Arabic part-time for a year, German at school for two. Arabic was easier by a country mile, but maybe that's just me. Note: I am rubbish at languages, but at least I can order a coffee / say hello in Arabic. The script is also a bit easier than it looks, especially if like me you are left-handed. It is also beautiful.

^ That is awesome, the man is a musical genius and I am barely worthy to listen to even five seconds of this anthemic masterwerk.

I have a big bag of hate for this already. And it's not a grognard reflex response, either. I have nothing against FPS per se. But... 1. XCOM is a squad-based game. That's the whole point. It's like making a video game out of chess where you're a Knight and can only zig-zag, until of course you level up to Bishop. 2. the XCOM game-world isn't exactly detailed or super-special, it's just earth under attack from aliens. Pretty basic. Pretty generic. Made awesome by the tactical TB squad-based combat and the exploration / tech research. So, this is nothing but trading in on the name of a once-great but now dead franchise. It's cynical, but hey this is the gaming industry. As the man said, make a great FPS, amke it about alien invasions, make it great... and call it something else. Remember the Command & Conquer FPS?

What makes it even freakier is the difficulty curve of learning German - it's a genuinely tough cookie to learn and the grammar alone is enough to make a hardened linguist cry.

I am an Englishman. Do a long weekend in London then go to Italy instead.

Whenever I get furious with Magical Volo, I check out his kamikaze missions over at the Codex and karma is restored. It's like a guy in a micro-lite armed with a hand grenade going on a bombing mission over Bremen in 1943. Magnificent.

I was going to compose a lengthy reply based on the collective wisdom of my four-and-a-bit decades of life. Then I read this post and realised that you're not going to get any better advice than this.

I've never openly criticised the moderation on this forum since the day I signed up, but your collective indulgence of LoFs blatant trolling is out of order. Re-read some of his posts, gloating about a tragic and fatal accident. Then try swapping 'Stalin' for Hitler and try on his posts for size, because for a lot of folks in Eastern Europe the two are pretty much the same thing.

For the record, I am a UFO sceptic. But this is a pretty cool video from the UK. The jets are, presumably, RAF Eurofighter Typhoon interceptors (am not a spotter, anybody with better recognition skillz please comment). Whaddya think? Guy in service station videos flying saucer.

That's what happens to counter-revolutionaries who "commemorate" the so-called "victims" of Stalin. Maybe you should try not being evil and commemorating villainous traitors who were executed according to the Soviet legal system? The so-called Polish "resistors" against Soviet "imperialism" were villains who can only appear righteous by ignoring that the Red Army flooding over Polish territory was the only thing that saved it from living its life under Nazi rule, whose stated goals were to kill everyone east of Berlin who wasn't German. You don't know much about Katyn do you, troll?

Cronicler, I suspect that we were taught completely different versions of the origins of WW2. There was no significant economic stranglehold on Germany, just a military one. You can't even blame WW1 for it: German imperial expansion was late and lacklustre and the British Empire pre-dates it by a good 200 years. As for Pearl Harbor - easily one of the most breath-takingly cynical and arrogant moves of WW2. Only Imperial Japan, in a frenzy of militaristic hubris, would have even dreamt of getting away with it. It is interesting if a revisionist school of thought is developing that drops a (superficial) Marxist analysis over the causes of the war (Capitalism gives birth to Fascism redux). I can't agree with it, personally. Flawed peace after WW1? Yep. Imperial hangover? Open to offers. Age of Dictators? Warmer. Economic stranglehold? Nope.

This is a tragedy. It will be interesting to see how the interim government performs. It is centre-right and socially conservative, sceptical of the EU. As another poster suggests, beware the EU bearing 'gifts.' My sympathy goes out to our Polish friends.

Is the new engine optimized so mere humans can play it, or will I need a new Area-51 Mega-Rig to run it?

Army of Darkness is usually the opener of any "Horror Night In" movie-thon at my place. The original Dawn of the Dead back-to-back with Sean of the Dead was a hit last time too, by this time it was about 0200 so we finished off with Dog Soldiers for the lulz. The damage was 7 bottles of vino, 3 XL Dominator pizzas and 2 litres of ice cream.

Stalking through central park, stealthed up? Yes please.

Still finding it incredibly stable. Elf chick = extremely annoying. The Architect = Looks like a new modern romantic circa 1983. Tunnels = not enough. Lewt = most phat, which is gooood. Actually, it's OK, I guess I'm 25% of the way through. I don't understand the hate, but conversely I'm not feeling the love either and micro-ing 4 guys with all the high level abilities becomes a chore (even for me). I'm playing on Hard, no FPW so far so I can see why people are saying it's easy.

I suspect that was Ike the President, as opposed to Ike the General speaking.

^ I read somewhere that they hope to explain some of the context around why they used atomic weapons. As for controversy over saving 'X' amount of lives, all I can say is what controversy? Backward militaristic monarchy attacks democracy in cynical act of aggression. Democracy losing thousands of it's young men fighting back. Miracle weapon offers opportunity to end it all by killing lots of the other side. Big ethical dilemma, perhaps, but one that was taken in 1945. Looking at it now, an acknowledging the human tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the villain of the piece remains the Imperial Japanese Government, as much as I'd blame Dresden on the Nazis.

Come on, comparisons with BoB are completely valid. It's a part of the same arc that Hanks and Spielberg have openly discussed travelling on. I agree that the European Theatre is more cinematic - familiar, open terrain and toys to film like assault guns and tanks. The Pacific is hand-to-hand combat in dense jungle. Nonetheless, these are issues that a skilled production team should square away before breakfast. I suspect the source material might have something to do with it.

^ I take your point, maybe I didn't make myself clear. Take Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. It's a classic example of literary war fiction. It's set in the South Pacific and it's about a small unit.

Good point, dude. Then again, this sentence is so garbled that if I were an English teacher I'd probably take to drink.

^ Strange, seeing as BoB does that too. Many of Easy Company are changed by the war, for better or worse. It's early days for The Pacific, I grant you, but Guadalcanal hasn't really drawn me into the drama (it's had 1.5 hours so it should have done - The Wire it ain't) and the characters are unremarkable.

Wrong on so many levels I don't know where to start. Then again, you're a Communist and therefore history is just for airbrushing, right?