Raithe

What I also like about this brother who is now ranting about the police handling of the situation and how they treated his poor sibling... it turns out that they've barely spoken to each other over the last twenty years. Now that speaks to a truly deep fraternal relationship.. don't talk to him for twenty years and then complain bitterly to get your spot on national tv....

Nah, he looks too noble to be Marburg. But he can do intense professional like nobodies business... Not that you get to see it a lot in most roles he plays

Clint Eastwood as Marburg is as blasphemous as it gets. The man's man that taught a whole generation how to be men playing a spy queen, its just wrong. Heh, could you imagine the aging Roger Moore playing Marburg as a straight role? More like an uber cynical version of the Saint then the light-hearted Bond they kept writing scripts for... Although with Christopher Lee's background in the SOE during WW2 I wonder how he might play the part... although people might get stuck on thinking of him as Dracula/Dooku.....But mayhaps a bit too elderly now for Marburg.

Well, that's around 20+ years of reading material gathered together. The term "triple stacked shelves" comes to mind * Just to derail things for a moment.. As things looked when I had to empty the "library" section to redecorate my room..

And now that one of them shot himself to end the manhunt.. the brother is complaining about the Police.. Insisting that there should be a second postmortem to check for taser wounds in case the use of tasers caused the guy to pull the trigger... And this is a guy who deliberately shot one policeman, and took the time to reduce the powder charge so he could shoot the ex-gf and inflict scars with a much less likelihood of actually killing her... So, fairly bulky guy, who shoots someone, deliberately scars up a woman, shoots at a police officer..and runs around like that... and whose mother basically said the best outcome would be if someone just shot him.... And now there's complaints about how the police handled the situation... yeesh.

In context.. hm, I have around 4,000 books on shelves in my room.. and carefully stored in boxes are around 30 or 40 pc games from yesteryear.. while the dvd game boxes of the more recent years occupy shelving downstairs with the computer... Sure every now and then I have a search through and clear out of the things I will never ever play again.. but still, it's nice to keep a library in track.. whether it's books, games, or whatever.. Besides, if you get only Steam installed games.. you don't get to enjoy shiney cover art as much.. Plus. the physical copy actually lets you feel like you bought something. Electronic only still tends to feel like you're just.. 'renting' it rather then owning it. Maybe that's just a psychological thing, but it's there.

Frankly, I would never buy a brand new game from Steam when for a similar price it's available in disc format... I like actually getting physical products and having manuals to flick through if I need them.. What Steam is good for is picking up the bargain games on occasion that are a year or ten old...

The other question is.. How long before someone blames video games and/or roleplaying games for both doing that?

No way this is gonna happen. Look what happened to Troika. Bioware doesn't need to lower itself to vampires & co. Ah, but emo and angsty vampires are having a major comeback to the "majority" population again. Note the sheer abundance of tv shows, urban fantasy book series, and films out ... You expect a publisher is going to skip out on the idea of catching onto some of that? I'm not saying it would definitely happen, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.

One way to handle it in a manner is along the lines of Saints Row 2.. the main character had a lot of spoken dialogue.. but they recorded it with 6 people (3 male, 3 female) so you could choose which suited your character perception the most.. I mean, okay, it basically split it up by "brit guy, black ghetto guy, hispanic guy, miss americana, black chick and hispanic girl" but it was one way to do it.. rather then just provide a single choice that might be at total variance with your view... With the budget Bioware seems to spend these days on VO, I wouldn't imagine that approach would be too difficult...

OMG I shall not care about something posted on TEH INTERNET? blasphemy!!! Well, you acted like I was forcing you to subscribe at gunpoint. For lo, there will come a day when someone invents a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet...

Well.. the song/music was okay by itself. If you just listen to the soundtrack it's fairly decent. It was just fairly horrible within the game. Mostly because of the really bizarre expressions on everyones faces during that cinematic....

Albatross- 24 (+1) - He manages to be professional and erudite..without seeming to be a total tool. Conrad Marburg- 3 Henry Leland- 19 Konstantin Brayko- 17 Omen Deng - 27 (-1) - For a man of his reputation and local contacts.. he was manipulated too damn easy. (and why didn't he warn Sung about the assassination attempt and get him wearing that body armor?? ) SIE- 26 Scarlet Lake- 26 Sis- 27 Steven Heck- 21

True Lies? Also of interest, might be the Bourne Identity that was made back in the early/mid eighties.. and I believe Richard Chamberlain was playing Bourne if I recall correctly. It actually hewed closer to the original book for about 80% of the movie...

You always treat anything you put on the internet as publicly available... It's always been weird that people treat some social sites as a highly personal diary and then act surprised when "secrets" are known by all and sundry... That strange mix of technical understanding to use computers and the internet with complete lack of awareness..

Uh.. No. I have to admit, the preponderance of slicked back hair and angstry teenage moodsters in JRPG's tend to make me wary of taking them seriously...

I've never understood the Obsidian OR Bioware fanbase that seems to have built up... They both produce rpg's that usually have a collection of good points and bad points.. and most of the time, you can have an enjoyable time playing through them at least once. Quite often twice. And now and again at least once a year.... Obsidian can quite often have good storytelling, but with issues over the gameplay mechanics that interfere with the story.. Bioware can quite often feel like a "travel to four hubs, accomplish sidequests, meet a bunch of dysfunctional characters, and kick ass" on a wash, rinse, repeat cycle... but they tend to do it damn well and still be fun. I've yet to come across a game produced by any publisher thats a total gem of perfection. There's just games with flaws that don't interfere with your enjoyment of them.. And half the time, what are flaws to one person aren't to another. So why get hung up over Obsidian OR Bioware? Comment on them, put your perspective out there, make snarky comments.. but turning it into binary set of one or zero seems silly.

Twister Soundtrack.. (not the score) - And for some strange reason it always makes me think of Mage the Ascension when I listen to it... Not sure why..

Sequels can be nice because players can get emotionally linked to the characters in a game, and it's nice to have a story that shows what happens after... The mixture of story and character developing and adding more to the feeling that the "world" changed due to what you did in the first game. While AP made a nice stand-alone storyline, and can be considered wrapped up.. There were plenty of areas that made you think "ooh, what will happen now...".

Albatross- 22 Conrad Marburg- 9 Henry Leland- 19 Konstantin Brayko- 17 (-1) - Did he think just how rare gay purple cheetah's were before he killed one for that jacket? Omen Deng- 26 SIE - 24 (+1) - Come on, she turns the whole "Is that a big gun in your pocket" totally around.. Scarlet Lake- 26 Sis- 26 Steven Heck- 21

Playing around a bit on Saints Row 2 - it's a touch more flippant then GTAIV... which I think makes it more appealing. What's kind of interesting is that in the midst of the humerously absurd, there'll be some standout moment of emotion. And to contrast that a few moments of totally nasty behaviour, whether on the part of a "bad guy" or the part of your character that will induce a total lack of sympathy... Going from the absurd of stealing waste from the Nuclear Power plant to mix in the tattoo ink a rival gang leader uses... to the attempted rescue of one of your "guys" who was being dragged on a chain from the back of a truck (which actually makes the bonds of connection between characters seem greater then any moment before that)... To the kidnapping of the manipulative gf of that rival gang boss and stowing her in the trunk of her car at the end of the monster truck jump her bf is doing.. (yes, making the bf realise just after that he crushed that car under his truck to the crowds applause..). It kind of bounces between the usual open-sandbox diversions, some amusing background notes and the occasional "yeesh, that's a sick bastard" reaction to scripted plot points..

Hm, yes.. I'd say communist russia really managed that.. How many homosexuals ended up in the gulags? Communisms wonderfully "united population" where the common man had meager possessions while the Commisar's had villas... Yes it destroyed the class systems that were present before hand.. it then created new ones in the form of "party faithful" and "everyone else who does all the work". I visited Russia back around '91/92 when it was starting to run into Glasnost.. And there was a strange mix of humour in how even the common traffic cop would happily sell pieces of his uniform to tourists for a few dollars because that would provide a few luxuries... As to the death tolls during WW2, do you have records that divide those into german soldiers killed by the russians, and those killed by the russian winter which they didn't have equipment to survive in? After all, I'd hate to see mother nature slighted.....

Hm, isn't that basic disease vs civilization areas, rather then just specific diseases in that environment? Any urban centers with large populations and poor/low standard sanitation is going to have greater troubles with the spread of disease... Part of the economic troubles are the large incidents of endemic graft in the majority of the government/civil systems. Heh, some of my family have worked for some of the big charity organisations that do a lot of work out in Africa and the internal reports about how much (or rather, what low percentage of) money/medicine/food/"whatever needed product" actually makes it to the intended places once it's docked is freaking hilarious or massively depressing (depending on your perspective on human nature).

Dangnabbit. I already picked up Ghost Master, Sid Meier's Pirates, Space Empires V, Port Royale 2, and Star Wolves earlier this week... They might be ridiculously cheap, but it does all add up. Heh, besides, I've got too many games installed at the moment. I need to go through and start uninstalling... I've got Civ IV + Warlords & Beyond the Sword, Vampire:Bloodlines, NWN2, Deus Ex, Fallout 3 + all DLC, DragonAge, Tropico 3, Baldur's Gate (tutu version), Alpha Centauri, Alpha Protocol, Kotor 1 & 2, ME2 and Batman Arkham Asylum...... Hell, I just spend about 10 minutes removing GTA IV, Prototype, and a couple of others from the machine.... It's kind of amazing how they build up over time.... then when you get an hour free you just slip on whatever the mood catches... (then if you're not careful the hour free actually turns out to eat away a chunk of the night....)

Damn it. Now I'm tempted to pick up Max Payne cheap from Steam just for the pulpy noir goodness.