Nepenthe

I dunno, the biggest workout buffs I've known were all (pathological) narcisists. :D

The sole exception, if you exclude ETA, 17N, IRA etc... (P)IRA was the only one to have religious connotations, loyalists as well, I'll give you that.

You (BruceVC, thanks for ninjaing me ) raise interesting points. I've OD'd on Fantasy at some point, which is why games like Alpha Protocol, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the Mass Effect trilogy (barring the last 15 minutes) have appealed so much to me lately. I think your final bullet point is really "the thing" for me, the more complete immersion, yes, including interaction of all kinds, is what put RPGs in a league of their own to me. (Also, In b4 "deus ex is not an rpg!")

Thinking of upgrading, but the only higher reward I want is the backer t-shirt, and I can't really justify going to 200 $ and not buying gifts (for other people) It's 15k now...

IIRC I always hang on to an early game bow so I can complete that one. But hey, that game was perfect and they RUINED it with DA2, right?

I hate to answer questions directed at other people, but yes, Alan is a long-time member (longer than me) of the community who now works for Bioware. You've forgotten the last mission of Contracts, then... And the first mission of contracts! I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting, too.

Picked up Blops2 and Absolution, today. Probably gonna kickstart my gaming with blops, see if I can find the motivation to enjoy something slightly more intellectually demanding in Dishonored... And Absolution I had preordered the day they became available, so that was that. You've forgotten the last mission of Contracts, then...

Fitness thread -> Pervert thread

Most threads that come up make me go that way. People get... passionate. Or maybe it's just because I'm not in the habit of starting any.

Meh, same rules for everybody, a lot better. Had a quick test when the f2p came and I could still use all the purple stuff I got while being a subscriber, which was nice. Right. I can live with that, too. I'm seriously considering dropping my sub, tbh, but I'm hanging on for the moment, since I'm having a general gaming slump (and depressive phase, but ymmv).

Happily I was there with a friend, so we had plausible deniability...

Meh, same rules for everybody, a lot better.

My cousin's American husband always teases me about how stupid Finns are. We think that gyms are actually for working out, and bars actually for drinking and don't understand that both exist primarily for meeting people of the opposite sex. I've been to a gym that existed primarily for meeting people of the same sex, though... Unaware

Fair enough, I wasn't calling you out specifically of double standards, but they appear to be fairly prevalent in general. The sad fact is that I enjoy Bioware even on an off day (or decade...) a lot more than I tend to like the "hottest new thing". OTOH, it's not like I can't enjoy a "christmas blockbuster" for what it is, but there's a middle ground of "gamer games" that are completely lost to me. But to talk of Mass Effect rather than Bioware and their direction (or lack of it) in general, the Omega DLC is coming in a week. Somewhat interesting to see what it's like. Leviathan was really, really good on its own, but suffered from that fact that it was irrelevant in the grand scope of things. So, in a way, no matter how good these are, they'll never be like Shadow Broker (which, in addition to the other good stuff, presented the first hints of the ME3 MacGuffin) or Arrival (which wasn't that good on its own, but...)

The things in BG1 (and more so in two) were a resurrection of the classic CRPG formula after a ~5-8 year break and moving to a "protagonist" + NPCs formula... and even in the gold boxes you had fairly memorable characters, in fact I'd say Vala the Amazonian (from Secret of the Silver Blades) kicks the butt of most BG1 NPCs, even if it was just her in a group of 6 anonymous player gens. Jade Empire and DA2 mostly. Gues the reception those two got will make sure we'll see more of the cookiecutter stuff... kind of like BG1. BG2 is a lot more original in the sense that it has a personal dimension, albeit a different one from DA2, while ToB isn't. Nah, it's just that it wasn't the emperor you saw, just maybe a duke or a marquess. No, seriously, I'm starting to sound like some of you gaming hipsters now, but for entirely the wrong reason. I use, or at least try to use, the same criteria for all games, instead of pumping my "**** yeah" fist at mindless shooter crap and then whipping out the monocle and cognac for postmodernist analysis of the Bioware games. In this case, even with all their faults, Bioware games are so much better than anything anyone apart from Obsidian or Eidos Montreal can do that it's not funny. And that's what they deserve to be measured against, not some idealized view of what a present-day BG2 would look like.

Yeah, more money, no homework, cured from near-paralyzing shyness... I got **** all to reminisce about.

I'm trying really hard to think of what the storytelling innovations in ToB were. Seriously, though, I'm old enough to have played the late 80s early 90s gold box ad&d games, which is probably the reason why I don't walk around with this jilted lover attitude - Bioware was never on a pedestal to me, so it couldn't fall off one, either.

Yeah, I always felt that the second one actually allowed for more playstyles than the others. I'd sneak through some ("as intended") and then just go ballistic in some... usually the first? Sicily mission.

What he said. I had the second worst hangover of my life, apparently from poor quality mulled wine (Glögg) I consumed on Friday. So I'm not sure it qualifies as a hangover, as I only had 2 drinks, but more of a poisoning of some type. Coupled with the fact that the drinks were had during what was the second worst date of my life... yeah That took most of yesterday, and had to go do some unfinished stuff at work, so not the best weekend in memory. Should be getting the grade for my dissertation tomorrow or early next week. Excitement in the air.

Had a cool out of body experience in the morning, assume due to my diet. Evening, had one of the top 2 worst dates of all my time. Waste of a good friday.

It does sort of require you to get an ipad (or some other portable entertainment system) though Yeah, unfortunately so does the life of a Brussels-shuttling hotshot lobbyist. Or wannabe one. :D

I'm a miserable finn, I don't drink beer... or vodka, either. Big fan of champagne, ****tails and single malts, I'm sure we'll be able to find a common interest somewhere in between. :D

There's a non-trivial amount of people that really like how the ending played out in ME2, particularly from the standpoint of how player choice was tracked and how it fed into whether or not the each individual survived the suicide mission, based on a variety of criteria. I think how this played out really fed in to why a lot of people were disappointed with the ME3 ending. For the record, I'm one of them. The best "Empire Strikes Back" type ending I've played in a game. And it made for a good platform for DLC, certainly much better than ME3 where I really can't bring myself into actually _caring_ about the DLC, since we have Evil Chris Priestly proclaiming how it won't make any changes into the ending...

On the ipad, yes. Being a radical fundamentalist, I prefer the paper version of White Dwarf. Just imaging the Book of Grudges on Kindle??? Actually, the ipad WD is one of the best publications on the platform, has a lot of enhancements over the paper version (After-action videos, 360 shots of models, zoomable pics). Also, it means I don't have to go to any of the nerd stores (and those are nerd, not geek, stores) and I can't subscribe to any paper mags since my mailman is a vandal. I've actually grown to quite like it, I have 3-4 mags I buy when I feel like it, don't subscribe, and get them in a minute or so - most mags allow you to start reading while they are still downloading. Heh, both my parents are classicists. They had a fairly defined target of firing me towards a "real career". Still, a very intellectually stimulating home to grow up in, I definitely wouldn't have become an LL.D. without their support or the "lower mental barrier" of becoming a doctor when both your parents are phds. Guess I could be counting my checks before they are cashed, as I haven't received my grade yet, but... Oh, definitely. I'm actually feeling a lot better now already (and last nights stuffiness passed without much ill effects, too). My metabolism is in absolute overdrive now, though. My face is starting to look like a teenagers and... well, let's skip the other stuff. At least I hope I'll be smart enough to not go back to academia. :D

He has a somewhat bigger role in DA2, which was probably missed by a lot of people who'd promptly forgotten about him. So, yeah. Agree.