mkreku

I spent most of the day trying to come up with a cheap way of traveling across Sweden, from south to north. It ended up with me paying $250 SINGLE FARE and cursing a lot. I'm still cursing.

I have somewhat dysfunctional divorced parents that I have to pay huge sums of money to be able to visit once a year (it's far up in the north where there are no airfields or train stations). I don't really like going there, but I do it because of tradition. I also go there to visit my only surviving grandparent, my grandma. I drive her around in my mom's car while she utters phrases like, "I'm so lonely, I hope I die soon" and other equally Christmas-spirit inducing little tidbits. My mom has Internet and cable (with lots of channels showing NHL and porn, woo!) so I'm quite OK while I'm there. But she lives with this guy who's really cool and humble when he's sober. But if he drinks just one beer (and he does.. every time) he becomes provocative and a braggart. We fight a lot. My dad lives with a much younger woman. She's actually only like two years older than my older sister.. But she treats me and my sister as if we expected her to be our new mom. I'm 34, I don't. You can't begin to understand how annoying that is. To hear, "When I was your age we didn't have snowmobiles, we only had pieces of cardboard that we could glide on in the snow, but you didn't hear us complain!" from someone who is practically your own age.. Me and my sister had a fight with her over that a couple of years back so she's toned it down a lot now. Dad has two new kids (my half-siblings) but we never really meet (except for a few hours on Christmas) so we don't know each other well. So yeah, Christmas is costly and not so cheery for me. When my grandma dies I don't think I'll be going back up there anymore.

Do you know of any good indie turn-based party micro-managing games? No, not really. I try to stay the hell away from them. I've played enough slow-ass Jagged Alliance 2-type games in my life. I can't stand waiting forever to move six people around one by one and then wait for 20 NPC's to make their (most often stupid) moves. I know it's turn-based. It doesn't really bother me that much if I don't have to move an entire party around for every turn.

Jade Raymond has said that they're going for co-op multiplayer in Assassin's Creed 2..

I really wanted to play this at first, when I got the demo, but apparently it's a lone PC game (no companions), and that's put me off a bit. It is? Then it's back on my interest list! I thought it was one of those horrid turn-based party micro-managing games.

Whenever you're in doubt, use the DE-CRAPIFIER to get rid of unwanted bloat-ware that usually comes with your new purchase!

Jade Raymond > Assassin's Creed

Another one in the loss column, despite Captain Clutch scoring the equalizer with less than 20 seconds remaining of the game AND being the only Leafs player to score in the shootout. **** you, Blake.

This argument is so silly it's not really worth responding to.. But OK, I'll humour you: Yes, I "meta-game" life. Mostly because it's not a game but also because it's something I have to do, whether I like it or not. Games I play for entertainment (and thus I don't want to have to meta-game) while life is everything else. Beginning to see why your argument is one massive fail? No, I don't want to join a guild. I want to play as an assassin. It's like playing a murderer.. or a scientist.. or a barbarian. They're not jobs, they're some sort of clumsy titles to be able to categorize people easily. If they were jobs, wouldn't I be able to play as a carpenter or something? Meta-gaming is when you play the game with the knowledge of the rules in mind (unaffected by what your character might possibly know) and adapt your way of playing so you do everything "right" according to the rules, to attain a certain goal. I didn't want to meta-game so I chose to play my assassin-wannabe as I pictured an assassin to behave. That wasn't good enough because I hadn't played according to these stilted rules so I could never become an assassin. Like I said, no matter how you twist it, it's still meta-gaming and I hate it. I chose move silently and backstab and some exotic **** that I don't remember. I'm not interested in alignment (which should adapt itself to what I do and not the other way around) and hide was not on my agenda. To be honest, I'm not even sure the class I wanted was called assassin, but it was one of the stealthy silent-kill types. I think it was an assassin.

No it doesn't. D&D has its flaws, true, but it's still great system. And which does not encourage meta-gaming. Yes, it does. And you even have a quote in your signature that kind of reflects that. I'm not interested in a system that's almost a game in and of itself. You guys can sit and discuss different "builds" for hours on end and discuss which "build" you will try in this and that game with later. Look up the word meta-gaming sometime and you'll see my point: "In role-playing games, a player is metagaming when they use knowledge that is not available to their character in order to change the way they play their character (usually to give them an advantage within the game), such as knowledge of the mathematical nature of character statistics.". I'm sorry, but however much you twist the words, planning your next mage-warlock-gnome-dishwasher hybrid ahead of the game is exactly that. I'm absolutely NOT interested in doing any of that. This is why Neverwinter Nights 2 failed for me (I've basically given up trying to get through that game now..). I wanted to play a sneaky bastard that attacked people from behind. A rogue or assassin. Cool, I thought. So I rolled a character, chose a rogue and went on playing. Every time I leveled up I chose the skill/feat that seemed suitable for my playing style. When the time came for my character to take the next step and become an assassin, it was not possible! Why? Because I had PLAYED like a rogue/assassin and not read the f-bomb-ing rulebook! The system actively encouraged me to READ AHEAD of my character and META-GAME my character to be able to become what I thought I was already playing! I once tried to explain this to Gromnir in some sort of thread about pen & paper gaming (that disappeared) but people who LIKE D&D refuse to accept this definition of meta-gaming, for some reason.

I've played through Deus Ex more times than I'd like to admit. Not very interested in music though. I'm guessing it's the main theme of Deus Ex or something, judging from your high-horse reaction.

The speaker voice in that clip sounded like a parody on how speaker voices normally sound.. but it was dead serious! Horrible! I did like the music, however. It must have been ripped straight from Deus Ex or something. Very fitting.

No, that's actually my beef. When the dollar is strong, our retailers raise the prices using the motivation "the dollar is expensive which means higher world prices". But when the dollar is weak, they don't go the other way. They just silently keep the old prices intact while in the background THEIR costs are diminishing and their profits skyrocket. So they will keep this price until the dollar becomes strong again, at which point they'll blame their even higher prices on the dollar and raise it again. There's never a reduction, only a constant cyclical price raise. It's no wonder one PC game costs $80 in Sweden. If you want a PS3 or Xbox 360 game, some games costs around 699SEK/$111 (Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect etc.).. You don't even want to know how much Guitar Hero 3 costs.

The guy who made the most stupid decisions regarding Deus Ex: Invisible War (Harvey Smith) works at Midway now. That's a positive. On the other hand, Warren Spector has his own game studio now (Junction Point Studios) and won't be involved in Deus Ex 3. That's probably a negative. Still, I love the original Deus Ex so much I'm still giddy about this news! Just.. Please, please, please carefully study and analyse what made the first game such a huge success in the minds of fans as well as critics! Don't do a Harvey Smith and dumb everything down until a monkey would be bored with it!

Yeah, let the poor rabble play with their old bicycle wheels and pine cones (if they can afford it)! Let computer games be an exclusive pleasure for the rich! If you can't afford it, then **** you! Or get a second job, you bum!

You've obviously not been subjected to the face eating caterpillars!

Yeah, Boiling Point had sucky controls. First they were REALLY sucky, but they were better after the final 200 MB patch. Still not good (too stiff and unnatural) but better. I'm suspecting White Gold will suffer from the same problems. I've written on their official forums and tried to stress the importance of having enjoyable controls in a game of this type, with an open-ended huge world to explore. I mean I can spend hours in GTA: San Andreas just driving/flying around the game world just because the controls are so perfect. I'm hoping for the same experience in White Gold but I wouldn't count on it.

Still looking forward to White Gold. Graphics are shaping up nicely: You'll again be able to drive cars, boats, tanks and fly helicopters and planes.

Is it bad of me to be happier on the nights when my Leafs does not play than when they do..?

Yes, weird graphic artifacts is one of the signs of an over-heating GPU. But I've never heard of such an extreme case as yours.. It usually crashes way before anything that serious happens.

Personally I'm hoping that they'll never touch the D&D license again. It's such a horribly stilted system that actively encourages meta-gaming. I hate meta-gaming.

You want a sub-community and your lure is Pokemon..? Good luck.

Yup. We're losing games, we're losing fights. It's like getting bum****ed every second night.

I have no idea why I think it's funny.

I'm currently playing with the thought of replaying all the Gothic games, from the first to the last, from the beginning to the end.