Monte Carlo

^ Sounds like a nightmare arrangement. Vanity developers hire pros to Make Their Dreams Come True? What could possibly go wrong?

I would love to be excited and have extreme nerdgasm but I don't know what The Wheel of Time actually is.

I'm not following the fan feedback for DA2 slavishly, but the average fan seems to accept that (a) mages are overpowered and (b) rogues, although useful and potentially powerful are in a bit of an identity crisis. Warriors are OK, although the 2H specialism is indeed a glass cannon that needs a lot of micro. OTOH the min-maxed dual-wield warrior is a chainsaw. Of course, they all want even more romances and DRAMA! but this is a given. Have to echo the DA - DA2 comparison to BG - BG2 aspirations... but Bio had their big chance with the first game. Sadly, DA2 if anything will probably be even more linear. Of course, I hope not, to this day I am genuinely astonished that there was no hat tip to the Durlag's Tower / WK type legacy of the BG games with a big sprawling there-for-the-sake-of-it dungeon. Cheers MC

I must admit the replayability issue is hitting me too: unlike BG2 there isn't enough going on outside of the critical path / main quests to justify more tinkering. There are also fewer character builds to tinker with and the deus ex machina Bio style gets under my skin. Don't get me wrong, it's a great game but I just can't get back into it the same way I can (like, right now) with BG2. For example, I can play BG2 with my own characters like a turbo-charged IWD game. Simply not possible with DA. I can solo BG2. Ditto. I can visit big dungeons that have nothing to do with the critical path. And so on. I think when the XP comes out enough time will have passed for me to have a mega-playthrough with a new character.

What Dragon Age really needs is Sherman flame tanks, King Tigers and Panzergrenadier as a playable class. Sorry, this Company of Heroes addiction is getting to me.

I'm a bit surprised at the WTF? quotient here with regards to the development time for DA2. The (proprietary) engine is done. Game mechanics and setting? Done. Surely it's about polishing / turbo-charging the existing engine and adding features, it seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable timescale, even with localisation and marketing etc.

BG2 works well on the widescreen mod but that mosaic / tile effect on the dialogue screen is more prominent. No biggie. I suppose that one day I won't be able to run BG2... and I will have to put the discs in a frame in my den like they were a classic platinum selling album or something. It really is that good. I have three copies, including the five-disc original in the big box and an unopened DVD version. No CE though, sadly. Cheers MC

Since my love affair with Company of Heroes started I've played hardly anything else. However, today I took ten minutes to make a new Dragon Age character (9 minutes mucking about with the face generator thingie, 1 minute spamming stats and waiting for the game to load) and founs myself strangely enthused. So I will be playing that to get ready for the XP and Return to Ostagar. I have also installed Men of War but found it a bit meh. Cheers MC

^ Er, he looks like Alistair, he clearly has the same VO artist and he makes Alistair-type gags. Yay! Basic Bioware NPC Template 459.01, please re-skin Alistair to look like a mage NPCbot!

^ Not really, all DA content scales. Another strange thing --- sell DA magic items and when you buy them back they scale too. It's like selling your +1 dagger at level 3, buying it back at level 15 and it's a +4 dagger.

That looks suitably awesome, thanks for the link.

Sigh. Company of Heroes 2: The Ardennes or North Africa. But no. However, I might try out the groovy looking Eastern Front mod.

An X-Com game with crates would be awesome. Did I also mention that it has tunnels. In space.

I dunno, maybe it's only a matter of time before the movie companies start agitating for disc checks and online technologies to validate DVD purchases... this is another issue. You buy content online, i.e. a game, piece of music or a movie --- then you expect all sorts of mildly invasive technology to kick in to authorise payment and download. But a physical copy? Why? Piracy is as big an issue for the movie and music industries. Their approach, interestingly, is different from that of the gaming industry. In the UK, the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) has become a quasi-law enforcement / regulatory body that does good work in this respect with a light touch. I guess enforcement is hard work, especially in the online arena. Screwing over customers, OTOH, isn't. It's easy. The gaming industry wants us to believe that they are using online as a tool against piracy as opposed to revenue gathering. Isn't it a happy coincidence that their anti-piracy strategy is also profitable, and damn those honest gamers who bought the product?

You work in the industry. Your condescending tone towards those with whom you disagree is therefore telling. For the record I'm an information technology halfwit. I run mainstream MS applications, I discovered Firefox last week and I certainly don't live in my basement. I simply don't want to need to connect to the internet to play games. For example, my wife works from home half the time. She uses the household internet connection. If I'm here too it's no biggie because I can play offline. Offline play also (and this is so obvious it says a great deal about your argument that I need to mention it) doesn't rely on the efficacy of servers run by the gaming companies. Relic's were FUBAR most of yesterday, for example, Sunday (y'know, the day off a lot of us like to game on). Your post earns a C- from this callsign. The companies are using online as a new, salami-slicing revenue stream. End of.

I'll probably not play it for a bit as I don't have a great deal of time. I'll combine it with my pre-XP play-through in February, I have a game with a 2H Warrior good to go, level 7 in Lothering. The Bioboards are split sort of 60 / 40 (60% in favour) but at least Bio cut the price of it. Allegedly combat heavy with lots of twinkie loot (duh), I'm looking forward to it. Cheers MC

Pay attention. Return to Ostagar, the doom-laden attempt to release a successful piece of DLC for Dragon Age.

So they finally released it, also I notice reducing the price (about

That red rollneck coupled with platemail dungarees is a hot new look. Edit: I take it back, the armour looks like it was made from a sawn-off leather sofa, or the interior of a 1982 Chrysler.

In FO: Tactics you could have a Sherman Tank covered with sandbags. 'Nuff said, and the game was definitely touched with the Wand of Awesomeness. Spent hours playing it. Post Apocalyptic squad-based tactics games = pure Win. People should be making more of them.

OK, so I'm not a sports fan but I genuinely don't get PC sports games. Cricket for example. FFS? Cricket. Narrowly beaten by Watching Paint Dry Manager XII.

Here in the UK, furious with the dessicated state of the music scene and reality TV pop stars, a couple of folks started an online campaign to get an old Rage Against the Machine track to Number One, thus frustrating the reality TV pop star du jour of his moment of sugary glory. It worked, and RAtM was no. 1 for Xmas. Bwuahahhaahahaaa! The Internet is still in it's infancy as an advocate of consumer power, but I think the games industry is chancing it's arm with this development. so don't completely write off the internet.

Oh, and another thing. The Cloud. The idea that we will store all our personal information online, on servers owned by rapacious multinationals with dodgy reputations when it comes to respecting privacy. Mwuhahahhaahaaahaaa!!! Not this old fart. I'll be the information technology version of a survivalist, with an external hard drive wired up to an ox-powered generator.

Well, I made my tiny little stand over Empire: Total War. I love the Total War series, they are up there in my top five games ever, the quintessence of what I'm looking for in a PC game. But for reasons that Tigranes has already articulated, I loathe invasive, internet-dependent applications like Steam. I won't use it, ergo I had to let Empire TW pass me by. Which I regret, but that was my line in the sand. Creative Assembly have lost a loyal fan and paying customer, I've never pirated a game in my life. So, yeah, I suppose CA and Sega are hardly losing sleep and the technological and commercial imperative to go down this route remains strong. But for me, I still won't buy them. Cheers MC

It's a brilliant idea just to see the Fallout Taliban freaking out.