Raithe

And personally, I found Saints Row 2 to be more mindlessly entertaining then GTAIV which seemed to have a touch too much angst buried in it to be properly fun.

Take it to the needy and lost... How about the Isle of Wight?

I'm surprised Purkake hasn't already mentioned Just Cause 2 for mindless fun destructive entertainment...

Review Hm, a little mixed there.

Well someone else is working on a new iteration of Neverwinter (using the 4th edition DnD ruleset) but as a co-op online thing rather then either a single-player or as an mmo... but I forgot where I saw the news article and interview on it right at the moment..

It's interesting that they've set it up so experience points get spent on opening up new skills/improving skills related to different augmentations you have.. but there's no direct "weapon handling" skills. There are potential benefits to weapon handling (recoil control and the like) depending on how you develop the augmentations and skills on your arms.. but nothing that's out and out "pistol", "rifle", "heavy weapons"... The only way to directly improve weapon capabilities.. is to modify the weapon itself. So that seems a touch more Invisible War'ish. But having "skill trees" as such within augmentations sounds a lot more complicated and potentially branching for character development for creating different character types then they had back then...

Started out as a human mercenary.. did the introduction bit, and the mars robot thing.. now every time I leave mars I just get jumped by 1 of two pirates and blown up before I can reach anywhere else. So I'm thinking I might just restart and see what develops.

The trouble I always have is that Al-Jazeera is about as biased and manipulative as Fox News, if noy more so.. It's so damn hard to take news networks seriously these days with the amount of control they put on just how news is told to suit whatever idealogy they have.. Or maybe I've just become ridiculously paranoid and cynical over it..

Giving Space Rangers 2 Reboot a try. I feel I'd actually quite enjoy this game.. if I could actually do more then get blown up by pirates past the introduction. The fact that their weapons do about 4 times more damage then mine and fire about twice as rapidly seems to keep having me blow up before I can actually do anything to upgrade my ship....

It's not a movie about character or plot really... it's a fairly fun film that's about a bunch of actions stars enjoying themselves rather than taking anything too seriously. I mean, Jet Li doing the whole " I want more money, I'm small. I work harder then you guys do." argument with Stallone was fairly amusing.

Hm, I was just poking around on the DE3 website and the first time I'd actually read through the faq they've put up.. some interesting things that I'm not sure if there's been much commentary on before..

Uplink had the cyberpunk "feel" to it. A nice enough gui representation that made you feel as if you were actually involved in some form of hacking.. rather then feeling like it was just some..puzzle mini-game .

While the AP minigame was fairly fast.. there wasn't that much of an out-n-out "hacking" feel to it. From the sounds of it, the DX3 minigame for hacking is something that's going to push more buttons for the atmosphereic feel of hacking. That could be part of the whole "yes!" response...

Oh, it's also got a brief role for Charisma Carpenter (of Buffy and Angel fame) and she's still looking quite good.. The basketball court scene is both amusing and well choreographed for the brief violence there..

It's been about 10 years since i last played ID... this is bringing back some fuzzy memories...

The Expendables.. Fairly fun in that fairly mindless way. Ticks all the boxes for action pieces as an 80's action flick would. Plenty of explosions at the end. A rather loud fully automatic combat shotgun let loose in a small corridor.. Schwarzenegger and Willis were only brief cameos.. But you do get to see Lundgren and Jet Li fight it out which is entertaining.

You don't actually need names to figure out who an informant is. If you've got what information they provided, the area they provided it in.. you can just work the analysis back to figure it out..and the more information you have that they provided the easier it becomes.. Okay, it's more of a slog, but even the Taliban must have some form of counter-intelligence working to figure out moles, informants, and such-like. Even just knowing that "this" information was provided to the enemy makes you start looking around to see who might have given it up.. which makes it even harder for the informant to provide further data..

But even documents 6 month old can reveal things.. Like potential informants, how things are structured... things that keep going even a year or three down the road. That's what can lead to potential deaths and further troubles.

Kasumi was interesting but kind of short. Had some nice story elements but was nothing too great gameplay wise. Firewalker - introduced the new vehicle which felt like it worked a lot better then the mako..although you didn't have the casual free roam with it.. just certain planet missions had it open. The story arc for that was nada too brilliant. Overlord definitely rules the roost out of all of them though. The storyline works, the gameplay elements are blended in nicely..

I need to figure out a game to have idling in the background.. Just haven't been in the zone to properly game the last week or so..

Gamespot short interview with Jean-Francois Degas And he mentions that in the next month or so we should be seeing a lot more clips/gameplay shots/ and trailer type stuff..

Shadowrun is fairly coherent with both sides of the equation. It's not like anything gets dropped in as out-and-out-fantasy that jars with the cyberpunk. There's a fair bit of in-universe commentary about things like how so many parents used names from Lord of the Rings when their children turned out to be Elves when magic returned.. and how much grief those kids had growing up with names like that.. How people tried to "push" the old fantasy literature stereotypes for Elves/Orcs/whatever even when it made no sense in 'reality'. Shadowrun 1st edition was set in 2037 if I recall and the current edition has progressed the setting to 2072.. but it all hangs together, and has developed in a manner that can feel quite well-done. They throw in a lot of culture references in the background that can be quite amusing if you actually pick them up. Quite often little mentions of things, I'm trying to remember exactly which book it was, but they even had a throwaway mention of 'UNATCO' a few years back (before they did SR 4th Edition).

It's geared around the PC's basically being the non-registered citizens who live between the cracks of society, and act as the general deniable assets between the various Mega-Corporations. Typical cyberpunk conspiracies, extraction of corporate assets, r&d theft, destruction of assets to get a leg up.. all wrapped up in various betrayals, cat's paws, and other questions of trust. Then it's just loaded with the whole "mana cycle" and 'magic' having returned to the world in the early 21st century, which brought with it the awakening of slumbering dragons, re-activated genes that turned various members of humanity into elves, orcs, dwarves etc.. and added the whole social upheaval and "immortal conspiracies" to standard cyberpunk. I've seen it played uber-cheesy, and really gritty. It can go either way depending on the mood of the GM and the players in the campaign

Shadowrun is geared around a major cyberpunk, then has elements of fantasy thrown into the mix. But the attitude and general atmosphere is geared along the lines of deus ex (even with the fantasy). The dragons are more likely to be running corporations and being magnificent bastards of manipulation behind a dozen layers and secrets then actually on the ground and throwing spells..

Oy Vey... UNICO National calls for release of mobster simulator to be halted calling it "a pile of racist nonsense"; Italian-American group protests Mafia II stereotypes Sometimes you get the feeling groups protest purely for the sake of protest....