Nepenthe

It's what I do for a living! I think my point was more that the DA weps and armor have still been pretty much in line with the accepted western fantasy level of ridiculousness, and hasn't still quite reached the proportions only seen in anime. Certainly big armor with spikes n' stuff is not enough to call it... "anime".

Stuff happened, but I no longer feel like talking about it here.

It wasn't oversized. The armor, that is. Actually, i just wanted to go to "the source" and dig up something oversized and spiky. It took me 2 seconds to think of something and another three to find it.

Obviously game pirated =/= lost sale. It does = someone enjoying something they haven't paid the asked price for. On one hand, I'm against the court doctrine of forcing pirates to pay the cost of the games involved (this is mostly a legal opinion, as due to the lack of contractual relation between pirates and publishers, the pirates should only be responsible for the damage they've caused, not for placing the publisher in the position where he would have been if there'd been actual, fictive sales...). OTOH, if I jack somebody's Bentley and go joyriding, the fact that I wouldn't have bought it anyway is kind of a poor argument.

I'd say it's about as false as associations get. Sarevok agrees with me.

From what I've heard of the voice acting, anyone pampered enough to consider Mark Meer "bad" (as opposed to not liking his interpretation) is going to feel like he's run into Vlad Țepeș.

The PS3 routinely wins all (non-bought ) blu-ray player comparisons in all fields except power consumption (probably even with the current rev) and dvd upscaling. It has enough oomph to need more power than the system-on-a-chip competitors, but because it uses just software upscaling, it's never really going to be able to compete with players costing several times more and having ultra high-end deinterlacing chips (like Anchor Bay or Realta HQV). It has exceptionally short load times (especially some of the older players can apparently be rather painful, taking minutes to load movies) and Sony has so far been pretty diligent in adding everything they can to it as the tech progresses (all lossless formats, even the 3D crap if you're into that sort of thing). S'Yeah, the only possible challenger to it as a BD-player could be the Oppo player, but I don't know if it's even out, I haven't seen any reviews for it. Denon &co. might also have something comparable, but it's probably going to be in the 5x-10x price bracket...

Np: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. So far pretty standard need for speed fare (underground or whachamacallit is the last one I've played, when I was in the army in 2004), but playing as the popos is fun. In fact, I preordered it the moment I saw the Bugatti Veyron cop car. Having now gotten to briefly drive it, I can say it was alone worth the price of admission.

With or as? If you mean the latter, I'm pretty sure gender's set to male for DXHR. If you mean with, there's always that strange service where you pay-for-play, so to speak.

Of course, you've only had to unlock it once, after which it stays unlocked ad infinitum. Vanguard/Shock Trooper is a personal favourite (these days with assault rifles as bonus talent) as well, so I can't really give other suggestions. Sentinels are a cool concept, but they were only made actually fun to play in ME2.

BLOPS. Seasonal (subarctic night) depression got to me, I needed something like this. Damn Activision and their inconveniently convenient release window.

One can mourn the loss of love and cruise for a piece of recreational ass at the same time.

Nah, I focus on more important things.

Yeah, that'll explain it. DX:IW managed to botch even that. I think DXHR is going more for a "postcyberpunk" approach... if we look at the old rpg.net description of cyberpunk "transhumanism is about how technology will solve all mankind's problems. Cyberpunk is about how it won't." even Deus Ex 1 was more aligned with the transhumanism ethos (hence the name). Also, we were seeing a luxury penthouse and a lab in the gameplay vid. I'm pretty thankful that they didn't go all Fallout on us and make even those a filthy mess.

I think it looks a lot more like cyberpunk than DX:IW did - which, I'll say, didn't look like Cyberpunk at all. Of course, here I could be snide and say that when somebody tries to push the boundaries a little, adopt elements of Cyberpunk but try to be creative, he'll get slammed for his product "not looking all that much like cyberpunk"... And if he copied it verbatim, it'd be a case of "not being innovative"...

Say he's going to form the best relationship ever, then eleven years later admit he's spent the entire time w***ing into a hedge? I think Duke would have exploded boo several weeks ago. So no, I won't be Duke.

Until a year and a half ago, I would have agreed with your friend. Love =/= melodramatic teenage crushes, more like being absurdly good friends with a member of the opposite sex. Or the same sex, I guess.

derp

Don't even think that!! Don't you know it's much safer to jump in front of a speeding train? I've seen that happen (in progress and complete). I'd like to go with an option that doesn't involve cleanup with a brush and a firehose.

It's already in the book(s), no point in retreading it.

That's... not bad, not bad at all.

That pretty much describes the early part of my year. I'd go through my days robotically, then come home, call my dad and just come apart. Spent some nights awake wondering between the gas oven and toaster in bathtub options, too. Perhaps I've been lucky, or unlucky, in that I've never cared this much for somebody before. There's been quite a few floozies in the past, some I actually thought I "loved", but it took the real thing to know the difference. The situation is kind of... odd now. I can actually be more relaxed around her than I've been in a year, and she's obviously trying very hard to be a good friend, at least (coz, really, that's what we always were first and foremost, probably what made it so magical to me - not used to being friends with girls).

No, but I can expect you to not pull stuff out of your ass, take a whiff at it and decide that it does, in fact, stink. (Which should be obvious, considering where you pulled it from.)