Nepenthe

Like I said Like he said, you are not playing it properly. There are no non-combat oriented classes in ME2.

*points at his earlier reply* Just as big a mistake.

Yes, Sentinels also allow for a pretty aggressive gameplay (albeit quite a lot less "CHAAARGE!" than Vanguard). Maybe the reason why I've enjoyed the game so much is because most of my playthroughs (3-4/7, so maybe not most ) have been on Sentinels...

When you talk about people as "Europeans", you're already doing it.

LOL at you for lumping all Europeans together.

SEALs =/= Seal Team 6 aka DEVGRU aka United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group.

They only want Microsoft's money. Maybe Beth is negotiating another round of x360 exclusivity?

No. Yes. In Mass Effect 2 if you removed all the RPG dialogue and turned it into a Gears of War cover shooter, it would still be a decent experience. Remove the dialogue and RPG elements of DA 2 and turn it into a God of War action game, which seems to be the route they were taking, and you have gaming hell. Still doesn't compute. I, of course, played the PC version, which played just as well as DAO apart from the retarded camera. Dumbed down just seems to be a general term for whatever the person using it doesn't like. Hell, a 1:1 comparison of friendly fireless DAO and DA2 tells me that simply the lack of an instawin button (*cough* storm of the century *cough*) makes DA2 miles "smarter" Sure, the lack of auto attack in the original console release sucked, but I don't see too many games judged simply based on their initial release, certainly not when the bug has been patched within a month, and certainly not on this forum.

No.

Maybe. No, I admit I'm Eurocentric enough that those three events were the only ones I remembered off the top of my head in addition to the USS Cole, African embassy bombings etc. As in, not being (unfortunate) near-daily occurences.

It would have been better if he could've been caught and put on trial, but obviously any sane person will know that capturing him alive was just outside the realm of possibility. Oookay. At the very least anyone affected by 9/11, the London Underground attacks and the Madrid train bombings is going to be pretty happy, I'd say.

Yarp. It's kind of the rubberband snapping back from the fawning over-praise ME2 got (and hell, it's if not my favourite game of all time, certainly in the top 5, and even I think it's kind of overrated) and DA2 getting, perhaps even more unfairly, a ton of bad reviews. I'd say 82 % is about on par for the shipped product, which some (until now) way better than average bugfixing might boost to the higher 80s. Also agree with Virumor, the demo is anything but an accurate representation of the game, and the 2-3 people I persuaded to try the game, after being turned off by the demo, have been thanking me. Or, at least I think I'm agreeing with Virumor.

High symbolical, low practical importance. Long-term impact unknown. Still, good work, showing that anyone can be gotten to (eventually) might make people less willing to become figureheads. Or not.

They've always taked decades to destroy the civilization, even in the situations where they managed to shut down the mass relay network for everybody else (and thus take systems apart piecemeal). Even then indoctridated infiltrators played a key role in their attack. Obviously it's going to take a lot longer, this time. p.s. what ridiculous numbers?

Exact opposite for me. Having regular start stop points means I get suckered into the Civilization mindset with "just one more mission" or whatever. If the game doesn't have those points, it's easier to just quit wherever. Sure, I get that too, but when the missions are 45min-1h, it's less of a problem. I like to finish my quests/missions in a go, which in the case of the Circle in DAO cost me one night's sleep in entirety. For the record, I'm still holding my judgment of ME2's story until I see how ME3 ties into it. The bridge part in most trilogies is very unsatisfying by itself, and will generally be made or utterly destroyed based on the final chapter (The Matrix trilogy is a good example of this, where things were still salvageable after the second episode, but utterly wrecked by the third one - the book examples are too numerous to mention). As it is, the main story in ME2 appears to be just a framework for allowing multiple ME3 seeds to be sown.

I like having regular easy start/stop points, I can never stop playing in "the middle", so the ME2 structure is very good for my sleep+work schedule.

No, my point was that democraticness is only a measure of how democratic something is, nothing else. The UK is a constitutional monarchy, so obviously it should score lower on the scale. Kind of like how "unamerican" can be both praise and an insult, depending on who's saying it. I'm still not sure how what I wrote can be interpreted in another way, certainly not in the way you fixated on.

Which wasn't my point.

Another entertaining example of how different people are. I wouldn't dream of watching an LP of a game I haven't played, nor would I spend weeks wondering about whether to pick up a game or not. Almost all of my game purchases are impulse buys after a fashion (even the preorder ones, like LA Noire yesterday), in a lot of ways gaming and talking about gaming are seriously disconnected to me. Kind of like if you can't stop thinking about family & marriage law whenever you are in a relationship, you might as well stay home. I really should stop posting while I'm working, I either make unfounded accusations or no sense.

Not what he said... Still, the best (actual) strawman I've seen in... weeks.

is not "fence-sitting" for Gromnir. we is using the primary definition o' ambivalent: we has conflicting opinions 'bout da2. is some things that da2 did well. is some things 'bout da2 that is irredeemable. is not that we cannot decide or choose, but rather that we is surprised by the degree that da2 is good And bad. HA! Good Fun! Obviously you're not fence-impaling since you actually tried the game out and formulated an opinion.

Democracy is not a value. Might as well argue that it's "unamerican".

*sigh* I never said that, so it must be someone else. No, actually you said the exact opposite. I must be off my meds, again.

They share some of the same members. Yeah, like ~3 people in the QA department. And the corporate side, of course.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-04-...r-speed-the-run The interesting part is that it's being done by Black Box AND uses the Frostbite 2.0 engine. I thought that our Game Industry Professional told us that such engine sharing was outside the realm of possibility, and we were ignorant peasants to suggest otherwise?