Raithe

It was.

A brief poke at DE: Invisible War... Just to remind myself on the contrast to Deus Ex....

Ignored as much about the World Cup as possible... Given the silliness of various schools and businesses arranging to finish early so people could go watch the match...

We know it's going to involve mass conspiracy storylines.. there's going to be a couple of twists thrown in there somewhere.. Apart from that.. we're all still stuck in the "wait and see" seats. As for the game system.. apart from that short demo at E3 which you can't really see much of.. again..too little information to really justify love or horror about it. <shrugs>

Nearest upcoming.. Mafia 2... I'm curious as to how Max Payne 3 will turn out to be like... Now that I know the new Tron game is a pc platform as well that's got to be one to try... Then it swiftly goes to the games coming out on the crux of 2011.. I mean, I'm bound to try at least a month of Star Wars Old Republic just to satisfy my inner-star wars geek... and the hankering to see which side of the border Deus Ex Human Revolution falls on.. DE or IW.. (and so far the sepia gold/brown pallete seemed more for the screen shots of Detroit.. the Shanghai ones didn't seem to have the same tone..)

Heh, just caught the last half of "Twister" on tv. Entertaining in it's way. Although damn, it makes me feel old when I look at when it was made. - cow flies through the air on tornado winds - "Look out, cow!" - a minute later, cow flies in from a different direction - "Another cow!" "No.. I think it's still the same one.."

Hm, and all this Deus Ex talk is making me want to re-read my old Shadowrun books and doodle up some ideas...

Hm, the way I'm reading it.. you get your augmentations.. which all have basic abilities.. but then as you earn xp you can choose to learn new abilities/increase skill at using abilities within those augmentations.. And you won't be earning enough xp to max out all possible options.. so you'll have to decide on your playstyle... So there's a skill system.. it's just part of the augmentations rather then being the "Pistols, Environmental, Hacking" as was used in DE.. It's not following the strict augmentation only of IW. (and I mean, you could chop and change your augs in IW to fit the situation you rarely got stuck with just the one style..) So it might work better, I'll wait until I can see more about the system before I fully say yay or nay over it..

Alan Parker - 10 Albatross - 11 Ali Shaheed - 10 Conrad Marburg - 10 Grigori Pazinhov - 7 Henry Leland - 10 Hong Shi - 11 Konstantin Brayko - 11 Mina Tang - 10 Omen Deng - 14 Ronald Sung - 10 (-1) - Because damn it, if you have evidence of the one aspect, why the hell won't he believe you on the other? SIE - 12 Scarlet Lake - 14 (+1) - A sneaky femme fatale with some good lines. Always golden. Sean Darcy - 6 Sergei Surkov - 7 Sis - 13 Steven Heck - 15 Yancy Westridge - 8

Hm, I actually liked the look of that.. I think it fits into the style quite nicely.. And seeing that ventillation grill was definitely nostalgic What's interesting is that in a couple of those interviews they've thrown out the word "reboot" a few times. Makes me wonder just how far they're planning on running with it if this is successful...

A little multi-player Civ IV between friends... Although I do have to say, much as I like the game..when you spend about 80% of the time staring at the "waiting for other civilizations" message.. it gets just a touch tiresome...

no... NO... NNNNNOOOOOOO.... they got like EVERYONE wrong. Deadpool is not a combination of mutations, he's the merc with a mouth who got an extreme healing factor to deal with a cancer that'd kill him, but it also messed with his neurology to the point where he was basically insane. Sabertooth and Wolverine don't really have a filial connection between them, just a former working relationship that went bad because Sabertooth became feral. I was more referring to Wolverines backstory, but even that has some inconsistencies like the Weapon X program being in the US when, iirc, it was Canadian. I did like that they faithfully showed how he was created and some of the things that motivated him, like the "death" of his woman. I didnt know Sabertooth wasnt his brother, I thought that part was accurate. I don't think they really went into his backstory... at least until REALLY recently. That was one of the reasons Wolvie was so popular was that he didn't really have much of a backstory but you got constant hints over time that were so tasty. And yes, the WeaponX program is Canadian, although I think that Wolverine was also Codenamed WeaponX. The woman who's able to influence people was competely fictional IIRC, and the whole malarky about "rescuing" all the mutants from weapon X was specific to the movie. Basically he went rogue on the government and was only made human after spending a LONG time with the founders of alpha flight (a canadian superteam), he still dealt with rage issues well after that although I think most authors forget that when they're trying to make him badass as possible. I could never quite make up my mind if the whole sideline of Wolverine learning intense martial arts & samurai code was a nice touch in an attempt to control his inner "berserker" side... or just the 80's jump on all things "Ninja!!!" related..

If Invisible War had been a stand-alone game it would have been recieved a lot better then it was. Unfortunately it just didn't quite follow in the footsteps of Deus Ex well enough. There were a lot of things I enjoyed about IW, but the whole never really seemed to gel together.. Ah well, here's to hoping it works for Human Revolution.. One of my key issues with IW was how they'd talked up and hyped the idea that there were seperate factions and that you could take missions from them, betray them to the others, and then deal with the consequences... then I got the game, played it , and was like wtf? Consequences basically zero. Hm, on a slightly different note, one of the latest E3 interviews... Following the "critical path" DE3 should be finished in 17-24 hours of gameplay, but if you take the time to explore the world and do sidequests it should take you around 30 hours.. Although I haven't seen anything yet on how gameplay is going to be set up... different hubs or something else... Curiousity and anticipation build.. (and that trailer had some damn good music)

Hm, well in several playthroughs now, i've had various weapon skills, and when I did the stealth & pistol playthrough I had none of those problems you've complained about.. aimed shots within the right distance would easily take enemies down. Sure, if it wasn't a headshot you'd normally need 2 or 3 on the torso but they'd go down. The Moscow Embassy ending sequence took me about 4 attempts before I developed the knack for it, but it's not that horrible.

Having a break from the repeated AP playthroughs, and having a bash on the Kotor2 restored project...

Although BP wasn't even running the oil rig when it had the nice kablooey... The other note of fact, there are several other oil rigs in the gulf there that have been shut down (although these ones are owned by American companies) because they've also admitted that they have no emergency plans in place if a similar accident happened.. Mostly because it's considered to be a rather bizarre accident to happen... Besides standard corporate policy... why is there this big stink over BP's greed causing the disaster? I mean, beyond the fact that it's considered a British company? (although these days nearly half the stockholders are American..)

As opposed to the peaceful, harmonious Brits who just rampaged across the globe and formed the largest empire in history. While no-ones trying to claim the British Empire was all sweetness and light, it's quite bizarre to view it as the end-all of evil. I mean, examine the territories before the Empire came about, and just how many places they were cheerfully commiting slavery, genocide, and general nastiness before the Empire was involved.. Sure there were problems, there was some unfairness, discrimination that bounced around on several levels - but a lot of the Empire was designed on having the "natives" of those territories educated and brought into the process of governing said territories. Since the whole notion of "Empire" became politically incorrect after WW2 and most of the colonies were released to their own rule.. How many of them have dissolved back into the same attitude of tribalism genocide and slavery? Frankly, if the behaviour was going on before the Empire, why do so many people say it has to have the blame for it all starting up once we stepped away from contol? With the British Raj, I always remember the issue of religion and how various important locals made complaints to the Governor over British troops interfering in funeral ceremonies (notably, widows being thrown on the fires). Said locals told the Governor that he was interfering in their traditions. His prompt reply "Gentlemen, let us then follow our traditions. You may follow yours.. and I shall follow mine which include hanging any man who kills a woman." Culture clash at it's best.

Yeah, a bit more expansion on the emails would be nice... For all the oomph about conducting research that gets mentioned at the start, apart from outright "buying" of information, there wasn't that much sneaky research to conduct... It might of have been nice to have several emails that you could have started at points rather then purely reply only... And for all the mail that turned up, there seemed very few you could actually reply to... A few tweaks and enhancements on that would be good for a sequel..

The other side of this that's a little annoying.. is that while BP own the rig.. it was a seperate american company that was in the process of installing another piece of machinery.. and that's what went kablooey. Yet Obama keeps making a firm reference to "British Petroleum" and making sure to highlight the "British" .. it really does make yah feel like the man has some sort of axe to grind...

Bringing back Gamma World.. and Dark Sun.. the only trouble is that its DnD 4e.. which really, really grates on me. <sighs> Much as I liked those worlds (and still have most of the original books stored away), I just can't force myself to face the struggle of 4e system and giving money to WoTC these days.. Throw in the cancellation of the Star Wars rpg.... I think I'm fairly struck off WoTC in general. Which is a shame.

Until you consider that it is an espionage rpg which has little to do with espionage and much more field work (which doesn't degrade the game, but it's still a fact) You can be a spy in the field and do espionage? At least in my opinion you can. It's espionage in the vein of James Bond ... It's cinematic espionage. Gather intel, figure out what the bad guy is up to, stop the bad guy from getting the girl.. or wait.. something along those lines

The A-Team.. was actually much more entertaining then I thought it would be. Some very nice moments, and a few in-jokes. During one sequence where a film smuggled into a psychiatric ward as part of a ploy to break Murdock out..the "film" has the A-team music play, and the introductory credits in the background include "Reginald Barclay".. - Which for those less geeky, was the name of Dwight Schultz (the original Murdock) character in ST:NG... Some very over the top moments, although the whole Tank parachute was a nice standout.. "What's he trying to do, shoot down the drone?" "No, he's trying to fly the tank..."

There's a wonderful counterbalance of things here.. Obama orders the BP chairman to visit the White House.. and uh, excuse me, "orders" a foreign businessman? Add in such things as the failure of America over the whole Exon Valdez oil spill.. and the fines related to that still haven't been payed.. and for slightly more current things, the Bhopal Trial.. The pesticide leaked from the factory, over 15,000 people have died due to it, (although campaigners have put the death toll closer to 25,000) .. and the American Chairman of that company skipped bail, fled the country, and now lives quite happily in America where he gets protected by the government from trial in India... Ain't it a joy?

The tough one is the 3 missions with less then 5 kills and no enemy becoming aware of you... The investigate the warehouse in Taipei is a fun stealth one...

The tux is in the game.. it's just hard to actually see... The fun trip to the party where you identify people through the rifle scope, Mike is automatically wearing a tux. You just don't really see much of it apart from the back of his collar (well, unless you look at the picture under service record).