mkreku

Gah! You people make it sound like there are only two soft drinks in the world. I drink Trocadero or Julmust.

I bet what happened was that your friends noticed you passing out, and apparently the hostess passed out too. So to play you both a practical joke, they switched your clothes, put you both in her bed and covered you in plastic jewelry. The part you forgot to mention was when you found that used condom stuck up your arse.

Don't you realize how utterly uninformed this makes you sound? I saw a rather recent study that showed that around 80% of all prostitutes had been raped and abused during their childhood. It is impossible to understand for someone who hasn't been in the same situation, but becoming a prostitute (a piece of meat that others can abuse) is actually a self-defence system. It is the "right" choice for that type of heavily traumatized person. (Of course, not everyone reacts the same way since we're all different). When your brain tells you what is right and what is wrong, you'll have a very difficult time trying to do the opposite. Unfortunately, your brain doesn't always have the correct answer and, contrary to what you might think, you're not in direct control of it either. Just try to explain why you fall in love with someone. Or better yet, try to control who you fall in love with, if you don't believe me.

Uhm.. They're comparing a FPS to a fantasy RPG, a space trading simulator and a post apocalyptic RPG? STALKER isn't even an RPG! Well, it looks interesting nonetheless. From the official site: "This is a role-playing game without growing experience of your character, without changing characteristics and levels. We want the player to develop his real mastery, moreover Stalker is an FPS/RPG game and much depends on his ability to fight. Changing characteristics, levels and player's experience, to our mind, would destroy the realism we try to create. As far as the rest is concerned, this is almost a normal RPG game where players travel the Zone, collect artifacts, weapons, reveal anomalous zones, communicate and trade with NPCs etc." I guess it is a RPG then..

Maybe I should clarify one thing: I voted maybe. Adults should be able to decide what they can or can't handle themselves. Personally I dont like the amount of violence in games nowadays. Manhunt made me physically ill. What's the fun in putting a plastic bag over someone's head and slowly (almost sadistically) suffocate that person to death? I just wish developers themselves realized that a game doesn't need to involve decapitations and mutilations to sell.

At least you american WoW-players don't have to put up with morons trying to insult each other in broken english! "Your a pusy!" "Shut, or ill fuk of you!" Etc.

Uhm.. I enjoy kicking little puppies..?

Man, I love the smell of RPG-geeks-in-an-enclosed-room in the Sunday Afternoon.. Ok, that sounded better with napalm.

That's odd. People think that losing one's sense of smell isn't a big deal, but it's a well known fact among.. uhm.. doctors who treat elderly patients that this is not the case. When we get old, our sense of smell is often the first sense that disappears. When you lose your sense of smell, you also lose your appetite. Old people who live alone often completely forget to eat, because their hunger is never triggered by any smells. It sounds weird, but it's actually true. It is also very difficult to get old people to eat, because they claim they're not hungry.. Stupid noses.

Are you very skinny?

It is very difficult to differ between what you think are instincts and what's been taught to you. As a simple example: Most people think gasoline smells good. If you think it smells good, consider this: Why have you never tasted it? Because you know "instinctively" that it's bad for you. But it's not instinct! The only instinct you have is to eat things that smell/taste good. That's how we as humans are made, as well as any other animal. You may not think so, but you've been taught (in this case warned) by society that gasoline isn't good for you. (And if you don't like the smell of gasoline, exchange the example for something you do think smells good but is lethal) Do you know what happens if you leave a normal car battery in a meadow full of cows? Within a few hours all the cows in the meadow are dead or dying. Why? Because cows think lead tastes good. They lick the lead poles of the battery until they die, going by their instincts.

You are wrong. In a family where noone is afraid of spiders, the children doesn't become afraid of spiders. In a family where either the father or the mother is afraid of spiders, the children do become afraid of spiders. We have a few "built in" feelings about what is right or wrong, but 95% (or more) are taught to us by society. Just think about this: if noone was wearing clothes (assuming the climate would allow it), do you think you'd be the only one wearing clothes? If people were masturbating in public, do you think you'd still be sitting in your closet with your wrinkled Playboy's? If your grandparents would have had sex with your parents when they were young, do you think you would still have been a virgin when you were eight? These are all examples that most people feel are horribly wrong, but none of them are genetically transferred. You've just been taught to follow these unwritten rules since you gained consciousness the first time.

I hate this stupid language filter! **** Cheney drinks ****tails! Anyhow.. With most normal people violence is not really a problem. But there are some people where the thresholds between reality and fiction is weaker than those of a normal people, and it is those people who can be triggered by excessive violence in media. The problem is that it's impossible to tell which ones can handle the violence and which cannot. Well, until it is too late. Violent behaviour is usually triggered when a person's ego has been hurt. Like when you're bullied in school (Columbine) or when you feel society treated you unfairly (Washington DC sniper).

The problem with violence in gaming and movies is not that it encourages people to become violent in reality. The problem lies in the fact that when people first see violence, they react strongly. Most people (except the mentally ill) have built in mental blocks that tells them what is right and wrong. When a person is subjected to excessive violence day in and day out, the "shock factor" of violence disappears. Violence becomes every day life, it becomes normalized. This happens to kids playing CS every day (it is a measurable fact, using war traumatized children as comparison) and it happens to adults watching action movies every day. It's natural for humans to adapt to their environment, and in this case it means that the mental blocks that make you react strongly against violence slowly degrade and finally disappear. This is also the reason why normal people are able to kill, rape and torture their enemies during times of war. I wish the world was as black and white as Volourn/Hades_One tries to describe it.. "You're responsible for your own actions blah blah". Well, what if your brain suddenly decides to erase the borders between what is right and what is wrong? Yes, I think there's too much violence in games. It adds nothing to a game to see brains splatter all over a wall or limbs flying to the left and right.

I once had to work a night shift two weeks in a row. Usually you work one week and get one week off and then one week of work again, but the schedule had been screwed up so I got two weeks in a row. I didn't think much about it, because I knew I'd get a lot of money.. Anyhow, the night shift is 11 hours long and the first week was fine. The second week I was beginning to feel odd when I sat there in front of the computer screens at work, but it didn't bother me. When the two weeks were over my boss called me and asked if I could take just two more days because someone had called in sick. I said "Sure! I'm Superman!" and went back to work.. it turned out to be two 18 hour shifts in a row. The last day on those last 18 hour shifts I began to see shadows moving in the corner of my eye. I constantly twitched in the direction of the shadows, because it really looked like someone was coming, but everytime I turned noone was there. I think that's the closest I've been to your powergaming sessions. Hallucinations.

Their problem has always been that they've underestimated their own product: when they let people apply for beta-testing in Europe, they expected 3000 applications. They got 30,000! When they released the game, they counted on around 100,000 people creating accounts the first day. There were 250,000 accounts the first day! Uhm, that sounds too much.. Maybe it was the first weekend? I wrote a news article about it, but it slipped my mind. Anyhow, you get my point, just don't trust the account numbers with your lives

Dungeon Lords (although it smells like vaporware right now) Gothic 3 (but it might not be out in 2005..) STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl (why did they cut the co-op mode?!) Strange.. I can't think of any other promising titles right now.

I'm a little worried about Obsidian's technical talent. KotOR2 doesn't really seem to be the most optimized code out there. I know they didn't have much time to work on it, but that only means (to me, at least) that they're unproven in the technical department. They're getting a full development cycle for Neverwinter Nights 2, so I think that game will show the true potential of the Obsidian programmers. It's just too bad it's a sequel and that they're not completely free to do what they want. Bioware's titles have never delivered what I want from a game, so even though Neverwinter Nights 2 feels like yesterdays news, it'll still be more interesting than Dragon Empire. Unless Bioware suddenly decides to make Dragon Age an open ended game with huge maps and a good game engine..

None of the above.

If you were playing it 70-80 hours a month (and some people are way up over 100 hours), you would be getting your money's worth. Two or three cents an hour? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Remember, you pay no cents per hour in a single player RPG (unless you include the purchase price).. That sure beats whatever cents per hour of a MMORPG.

I still use 2E D&D.. I never quite liked anything above that.

Uksi, kaksi, kolme, nelj

Why would you not want to go to a Bridal Expo? Imagine how many girls must be gathering there, desperate to find a guy so they get to buy that 5,000$ gown.. I once went to this strange new age/health expo.. I don't ever think I've seen so many pretty girls gathered at one place before. There were thousands of them, and I felt like one in a million being male!

I was like, "Haha, stupid movie!" all throughout the entire movie. Then at the end and I crapped my pants. Edit: Sorry about the spoiler! I thought everyone had seen (or heard about) it by now.

*twitch* *twitch*