Raithe

Well I've started listening to some "learn spanish as you drive" cd's to pick up some basic vocabulary.., as well as having acquired an english-spanish dictionary... Still, I have till April to pick up the spanish. But apparently the bachelor weekend and hen weekend are happening in November for various reasons...

Have been told to prepare for a friends stag weekend. Including a mailed list of items I should have: I think I shall feel relief that I'm actually getting past the lingering remnants of hacking cough before this event occurs..

If it has more "Desmond's Journey" crap, I'm never going to play it. The whole thing with the AC games is you can wait awhile, then youtube watch all the cinematics edited together without any of the wasted time and hour sink...

Scripting is fine for one-off events. But when you have to track what reactions a group has to your collective actions and behaviours.. it needs more then a script running. There has to be some form of ticking boxes / collecting numbers that work behind the scenes. I'm not saying it should flash up "+10 affection" on screen for you to see, but behind the scenes there has to be something happening so that different groups will react to your collective behaviour over time, not just the latest thing you did.

Non-lethal takedowns can make sense for certain tactical / strategic reasons... But to have a character who is a complete pacifist, yet still gets involved in protecting other people from violence is.. unusual in certain settings. I mean, I know historically you have buddhist belief stretching back for years, and elements of various martial artist practitioners who tried to practice non-violence whilst mastering certain physical talens... but extreme pacifism and philosophies revolving around how "bad" war, violence and such are tend to be a bit more "modern" ethical and morality concerns. During the middle ages to renaissance setting, high level pacifism would be..exceptionally unusual to develop considering the normal lifestyles and prominent attitudes. You tend to need more people not so concerned about getting the basics of food and shelter before they start worrying about morality of killing people who are doing bad things... So setting up a complete way to play through a game non-lethally tends to make more sense in more modern day settings then in sword waving, spear chucking eras....

Safe isn't too bad if you enjoy Statham action flicks. Heh, I took it to a dvd night with friends, and one of the girls was all "oh, my bf doesn't allow me to watch any film with a topless Statham in.."

Of course, you can look into just how long a "good" pc will last you compared to a gaming console... If you lay the groundwork of getting a bleeding edge pc, it'll last you for half a decade with only minimal upgrades to keep it going. Once you reach the 5/6 year old pc point, then it'll be toddling along in the low-mid range of pc's. Hell, my sister picked up a laptop for about £400-500 and she pretty much uses it just for some internet surfing, email, itunes, and gaming. And she's quite happy at how much that works out over the 3 years she's had it and it's still going strong for her gaming wise. How long do consoles last for?

Was enjoying a bath and reading .. and in the space of turning a page or so I suddenly got hit by a wave of exhaustion, nearly dozed off and only just avoiding dropping my copy of Eclipse Phase into the water. Always weird when that sort of things jumps out of nowhere. Of course, not quite up to the scale of Calax' troubles. Hope things take a turn for the better all around.

The main problem people gave grief over was the hacking mini-game, but there's so much to enjoy that you can't let that potentially spoil things..

Caught last night's episode of Castle. A murder, in a sci-fi convention. - The throwaway lines are a-plenty. "I love sci-fi. good sci-fi. I mean, we're talking Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, that show Joss Whedon did...." Jonathan Frakes doing a brief cameo on camera besides directing it as Castle's "Number 1 fan!" and the muttered comment as he leaves "oh how the might have fallen..."

I think there's a big difference between someone using their fame as a soapbox in a really serious "i'm going to bludgeon you with my morals", and someone who's doing a more humerous take on presenting their views..

Well here's hoping it suits your needs..

Dishonored - It wasn't overlong - its basically set up of 9 missions. But each mission really has multiple stages. It really is a nice open way for you to develop different methods to achieve the goals and progress along. You literally cannot get all the possible powers maxed out in one game, so you have to go with powers that suit your style of play rather then try combining them all. Some of the "nice" non-killing methods are actually much nastier and brutal then actually just killing the targets. I mean seriously, shaving their heads, cutting their tongues out, then having them sold as slaves to mines that are half a mile under the ground? Or rather then killing someone, knocking them out and letting their personal stalker kidnap them with a line of "yes, I'm going to take them to another country, lock them in a room and spend the rest of my life teaching them to love me..." Figuring out interesting combinations of powers can be quite fun. The possession one has a few good tricks, and the time slow/freeze as well. The Blink (teleport) can make stealth somewhat easy once you get to grips with it. The atmosphere is fairly rich and dripping and the background lore connects quite nicely. Combat is fairly brutal, it only takes a couple of hits for you to be deaded so you do have to be careful in just how you go about it. But the stealth kills can be quite amusingly gory. Also, being able to turn off portions of the HUD as you want to certainly adds something to it. Turning off the "go to here" markers makes exploration a lot more fun. Edit: Also, what Rosbjerg said. It's got a lot of nice things and potential, but it doesn't completely satisfy. I will say it's a fair bit better then AC tho.

Well last year they did have the 20th Anniversary of Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy. 8 years after Return of the Jedi. 8 years before the prequels came about. And they pretty much kicked the EU into existance beyond those "Han Solo before Star Wars" books that had been published. The Marvel run of Star Wars / Return of the Jedi comics (which I admit, I do believe I have a hundred or so stashed away in a box in the attic) pretty much filled in the gaps of what Luke, Han, Leia and the rest were doing between A New Hope and Return of the Jedi. If my memory doesn't fail me too much, there was one brief mention of the Clone Wars in a story where the "Clone Masters" were the bad guys but they never provided any details beyond that. But once Heir to the Empire / Dark Force Rising / The Last Command kicked their way onto bestseller's lists and re-invigorated the fanbase.. boom. The EU exploded big style. But no matter what you say about Anderson's books, they didn't get quite as bad as Karen Traviss and her desire to instil her dislike and loathing of Jedis (viewed as Nazis) and make Mandalorians uber-powerful jedi killers when they weren't being reaaaally nice democratic farmer types.

Heh, so in an interview a few weeks back, Hugo Weaving very casually mentioned his view on his role voicing Megatron in the Transformers films.. Which to me doesn't sound as if he's being critical of Transformers of Michael Bay, more just "eh, it was a paid gig. I turned up, I did the work, it didn't have anything more to it then that." However, it seems to have offended Michael Bay who in return slammed a few criticisms Hugo's way in return.. Methinks someone saw it as more of a personal attack then anything else...

If you thought it was an actiony shooter game, then the controls were clunky. If you didn't treat it as a twitch-fest type, it wasn't so bad. The main grief I had was the hacking mini-game for the annoying controls. I have to admit, it did feel that a lot of the reviews complained about the shooting, but that they'd given no attention to the whole "need to improve your skills" aspect, or the fact that it requires you to be close and aim, not just float the cursor over and blindly fire... I've heard a few people talk about glitches and crashes, but in the handful of times I've replayed the game I've never had any serious issues derail me... Personally, I'm in the group of people who quite enjoyed AP. The choice and consequences, the different reactions of characters depending on how you played it, the differences that played out depending on whether they liked or hated you.. And slipping a mine to a certain someone right at the end was certainly worthwhile..

Hm. I'm not sure on the "lose soul and carry on" aspect. Since from whats been said you need the soul to do any of the magic... Having a pc with no soul and able to use magic would undermine the whole world setting... I can see some form of uber-strange curse affecting the soul, mixed in with being in the wrong place at the wrong time.. but not getting it torn from you.

It's a monday morning. Having a bout of that spacey and slightly depressed over repeatedly banging my head against a few metaphorical walls. The winter chill is certainly settling in as well, but at least the worst of the man-flu seems to be over and I'm going an hour between hacking coughs.

Woke with a bit of a headache, so tried lurking in bed for a bit rather then get up. Puttered through the day with various things, and had a poke at trying to figure why my pc wasn't recognising the microphone on my Razer Cacharias headset.

I saw Skyfall. Hm, I'm not totally sure what I made of it. There are a lot of elements that were quite good, some nicely developed characters, a nice way of showing how various people in MI6 connect to each other... But it seems a bit..odd that the whole story comes down to the "showing people why you need human agents as well as satellites and such", "Bond proving he's not too old for this" and a way of changing M over and introducing a new Moneypenny. Didn't we have Pierce Brosnan proving the need for human agents a couple of films ago? And for the third Craig film to already have people in-universe making the comments that he might be getting too old and needing to slow down and get out of the field.. I will admit, the reappearance of the Aston Martin from Goldfinger was a very nice move. Along with the M and Bond banter. Bond flips the eject button open "Are you going to be like this on the whole trip?" M rolls her eyes "Oh yes, go on, eject me then,"

The other side of influence is how much it should be linked to individual npc's and characters, and how much is linked to factions / groups... Or even some combination of both. If the Faction someone's a part of loathes the sight of you, how much does that effect individuals within the faction? heh, if you've done something that saved the mother/sister/love one of a faction member, how will that individual react to you differently compared to the rest of the faction? Will the perception of you by one faction influence another faction you haven't encountered yet? How global will reputation/influence be? As in, will everyone in the world automatically regosnise each and every reputation shift or will it slowly be known as time passes in the world? So if you do x action and save someone from bandits in y location, the Reputation gain is immediate to characters there, then once several days have gone by, villages and towns nearby will react to that Reputation change, then a week or so after everywhere in the country will be affected by that Reputation change..?

That was actually the cunning ploy where nearly all the EU created before the prequels is set AFTER A New Hope. WIth the most extensive stuff being in that 5-20 years post Return of the Jedi. The only real stuff set before A New Hope.. is set hm, 5,000 years before, 4,000 years before, and 1,000 years before. That let them leave the big hole for the prequels, and post prequels has let them fill in those gaps.

Or go scientific with your drinking and go for the Whiskey Cloud (although any booze can be used). Nothing quite says classy drinking like pouring a short of alcohol into a 2 liter plastic bottle, putting it under pressure, whipping the cork out and watching it vaporise.. sticking a straw in and breathing deeply....

I have to admit, they do seem partial to cancelling series that are built around an arcing story.. John Doe was a series that was close to my heart. And again, that ended on a particular cliffhanger and they cancelled it before answering any questions in a 2nd season. Threshold, similar. Odyssey 5.. boom, killed on a cliffhanger. Defying Gravity.. yet again, major story arcs in progression, and they kill it. For the non-story arcing but quite decent series.. Breaking In. Fox let it run for a chunk of episodes then cancelled it. Only to bring it back the next year, let it run 5 shows, then cancelled it once more..

Heh, maybe we should start the list of "favourite tv shows that were cancelled before they could go anywhere"... Although I think we've fairly covered Firefly already with these lists. +