Nepenthe

I remember seeing Bio actually acknowledge this in an interview. Too bad that I have no recollection of when and where.

As a reply to the OP, I think that a consensus was reached that the intelligence officer(s) who carried out the deed weren't the people really responsible for it, just the only people in the whole chain not protected by diplomatic immunity. After the state of Libya had acknowledged its liability for the event, it really was more like an act of war, for which the state itself is liable... :/

That was a lot more than two pegs.

Yes!

"THE ex" either forgot or chose to ignore my birthday. While I don't consider myself the center of the universe, I did have a dozen very boneable chicks remember it, so she has been downgraded from the one that got away into the one I got away from - at least for now.

Phew. In which case I must get a silly haircut, an iphone and an epic sense of entitlement. I think I've done a pretty good job of avoiding that. And thanks. Still having a kind of midlife crisis, I wasn't supposed to be a grad school at this stage, but the 19 months I took away to do "real" work in between really messed my schedule up.

Thank you, good sirs. Are you on some kind of medication? If not, perhaps you should be?

Turned 30.

I thought it was blatantly obvious already from what they were showing - no need to try demos.

King's Speech. Good movie. I was probably the youngest member of the audience by far, and certainly the only one in my twenties (even if only for another 24 hours or so at the time it started)

I'm pretty sure there was something along those lines in DAO. At the Earl of Denerim's.

I know, I was one of the people speculating. Still would like to know when I can get my grubby paws on it! Unless there's been another "delay" that I've missed..the talk was just delaying it till the end of April'ish.. Not really a huge shift in release.. The only information released was that they were delaying the game "into the next fiscal year". Which, for them, indeed starts in April 2011... but ends in March 2012. So yeah, considering how "done" the game appears to be in reviews, April is possible, or they have just polished the first three hours of the game and realised they need another year for it.

I'm being so quiet mostly to not jinx anything, but I just noticed that my ex has started wearing really odd clothes during the past six months or so. She used to pull of a kind of college chic really well, now it's gone into shapeless goth. And before somebody says she's pregnant, possible, but this certainly started before at a very early stage. And no, what I'm afraid of jinxing is not related to THE ex.

I know, I was one of the people speculating. Still would like to know when I can get my grubby paws on it!

Crazy stuff obviously, need you ask? No credit for partial answers, maggot! Also, thumbs up for the Flash Gordon connection.

Yeah, unlike Quantum of Solace, which nobody saw.

Been catching up with the new stuff for this game. Was pretty much THE game for the first half of this year (in fact, if ME3 comes out in December, 11/12ths of this year), so kind of sorry to see the release date back up in the air. Hope it's just a sign of Squeenix knowing they have a megahit in their hands and wanting all the profit in one fiscal year, and not one of those AP style release date changes. Anyway, 'tis looking pretty good for now...

Yeah, pretty much agree with what you write here. Of course, I always spent an absurd amount of time in ME1 to get my squad into a visually matching set of Armax Arsenal Predator L/M/H armor, so I'm definitely one who appreciates customisation in this front. (which reminds me, non-randomised store inventories FTW ). I would have preferred to have hardsuit options for all squadmates, but it's hardly a gamebreaker for me. Though, it looks like Miranda's new armor is still going to have just the see-through rebreather as headgear, so another ball dropped there. I think the overpoweredness of the mattock has been slightly overstated - it hits like a sledgehammer, all right, but (IIRC) it has a seriously limiting ammo capacity, which limits its useability in some of the missions. I think that the current trend with Bio is going to be that the main character and NPCs won't be drawing their equipment from the same pool, as it were (or, you won't have the opportunity to strip NPCs for main char benefit/possible problems down the road). There's a presentation by the ME2 lead gameplay designer using Alistair in his diapers, huddling at the campfire to illustrate the point. That said, I can rationalise it away in a sci-fi setting (with future/present-day RPGs often using different loot systems from the classic FRPG "kill guys and use their stuff" approach). DA2 is going to have NPC specific armor, so we'll see how I manage to live with that in the context. I hope they evolve it a bit and go to a system of "visually distinctive, of course, separate on-board/mission gear for the NPCs. Come to think of it, considering the ridiculously small amount of casual clothing available for Shepard, I have to wonder what they've been thinking. The game files have a ton of gear (including the blue-black alliance uniform and an all-black variant of it) that are simply inaccessible. Bioware developed an aversion to toggles and options of simply visual import?

Well, I still think that's the equivalent of me throwing a fit (as a lawyer) over the quarian kangaroo court. Disagree with the quoted part. The problem comes from the unification of onboard and "offboard" uniform for squadmates, which is only indirectly related to the alteration in the gear system. Preferred the way it was handled in ME1, even though I don't think that the gear system was particularly good in the first one, and generally consider ME2 to be superior in this department.

You're exposed to a vacuum in both the derelict Reaper and the Collector cruiser. And there's at least one assignment that takes place on board a ship that has been venting atmosphere for who knows how long. No. Because they use the "mass effect field" hand-wave to explain how you can be in a non-breathable environment and still not in vacuum. Only an "issue" if you are just concentrating on finding... "issues". OTOH, I think DAO DLC is kind of close to being an example of how to not do things. Abovementioned "storage chest" only in paid day-1 DLC, in-game characters hawking said DLC, 95 % recycled assets... sigh. Delivered a strong impression of existing only to recoup massive production costs... and of DA definitely being the "secondary" Bioware franchise.

You think so? So, to do away with the silly traditional inventory, they ended up with a system where newly found weapons magically reproduce and equip themselves to your squad, where "weapons lockers" found around the game are in fact "weapons factories", and in which a rebreather (and nipple suspenders!) protects you from hard vacuum. I didn't realise you could hear your guns in hard vacuum (and I probably think they wouldn't work, either). Curiously, the only time you're in a hard vacuum is at the beginning of the game, when neither of these things happens. Yeah, they caught the silliness of the autocreating guns themselves, it's nice to see that it's explained in Kasumi.

I think the idea was to make a gear system that actually made sense, instead of having an invisible truckload of gear with you at all moments. I'm sure there is some logical money-grubbing problem with that concept, but it evades me.

Keep logic and common sense out of this! It's clearly a ploy to rip us off in some way!

Trunk or use a trenching tool instead. This was more directed at the people claiming it's necessary to use a snowblower to get a little bit of drift snow from behind your car. If you have a snowblower, put the shovel in its place and sell it. I think you may be underestimating the last few decades' super-sizing of the American homestead. Snowblowers are pretty common in modern American exurbs full of 3500 square-foot homes with multiple-car garages and 100-foot driveways. (And, given the physical fitness of many Americans, they can be pretty necessary in big storms.) Even in more reasonable neighborhoods, there's usually at least one person on a given block who has one, and they become the envy of their neighbors when the snowstorms come. (For my part, I live in an old neighborhood with small houses and lots. As a somewhat-doughy but reasonably healthy 30-something, I dig.) Not so much underestimating, as somewhat poking fun at it. In this neighborhood a ~400 sq. foot. one bedroom apartment with a small balcony costs 260 000 euros, minimum. Clearly, a trenching tool/small shovel is what people use to dig their cars out. A garage spot (heated) can be 300-400 euros a month. A lot of people shovel... Or, you could say that i'm not so much poking fun at it, but being mildly envious of the whole situation.