Raithe

Hm, maybe I gave up on it too soon. I caught the first half a dozen episodes and it just seemed like such a ..frat house version of Sunset Strip. It might have just clashed with the disapointment over that being cancelled.

I never did figure out why they cancelled Sunset Strip.. only to have 30 Rock turn up 4 months later.. Hm, maybe 30 Rock tends to be more.. I'm not sure how to put it without coming across as snobbish but.. juvenile humour compared to Sunset Strip. Sunset Strip always seemed to be funny in a smart way without needing to go for the cheap laughs... and 30 Rock seems to me to be practically the same setting, just only using the cheap laughs. Not that I have anything against cheap laughs and pratfalls. I just like to have smart and witty dialogue. Maybe it's my nostalgia for that old school repartee. Ah well.

Tried to ponder how to get into the work place after spending the last 8 years being the primary carer for a disabled family member... Dang it.... Skills out of date, and you can't exactly put "disabled mother" as a reference on your cv...

Endings wise, wasn't it said that there's something like 5 principle endings.. but each one of those has variations within it.. sort of 1A, 1B, 1C, 2A, 2B, 2C etc.... So that's going to be where all the choice & consequences blend in together on the ending... If you think about it, they've been pumping it more as the choice & consequences having an effect in the middle (ie, during the playthrough) more then for the big finale and how it ends..

And apparently Amazon have a pre-order bonus now.. . But it's nothing that will actually effect in-game play apparently. Just a 24 page "Field Guide" that provides hints, tips and advice on the weapons, skills and abilities of AP....

They all seem quite interesting.. But I think Saudi being the first hub that you have to do to start the storyline might take away some of the "travel around as you wish".. but it should still be some fun... We've seen a fair bit of Moscow in the trailers.. so I think I'm interested in seeing how Rome and Taipai really turn out...

Of course, you never know when that full formal embassy party you're attending will get crashed by goons in full combat gear....

What I find kind of interesting is that they're opening up a touch more "choice & consequences" in it compared to the GTA games... The fact that there's an "honor" system or some such that keeps track of how you act, grows your legend, and changes how people react to you when you visit places and encounter npc's....

Why do I get the feeling I'm going to go freelancer first playthrough....

Just the natural talent of raw oner-awesome?

You get the choices of clothes / armor as you go through. Whenever you're in the safehouse I believe you can swap and change... Different types of armor relate in things like being able to carry more tech gear or having more effective armor..but then you have a downside of less stealthy. If you go for stealthy armor, you can't carry as much guns n gear... Things like that. Also civilian wear is available, and you can choose it for the appropriate venue... As was mentioned wearing heavy duty armor in the wrong places will get it mentioned and possibly effect how people view you... Lets hear it for .. Choice & Consequence people

Hm, well the 4 years of Deutsche I took at school about 15 years ago didn't stick.. since I understood bloody little of that.. But I have to say, that's the sharpest and crispest I've seen AP looking in any of the trailers/previews so far.. Really don't see why people have been having issues with those graphics..

How many used exclamation marks in the titles? Or were they all saved for the reviews comments?

Yeah, in the UK a period always marks the decimal point.. while the comma is used to highlight the 1,000 mark and large numbers beyond.. A single space between one integer and another always suggests seperate numbers...

The return to Civ IV and Beyond the Sword... My, it's amazing how much time can suddenly get sucked away when you planned to just "pop on and do a couple of things...."

Dang it.. the trailers and such for this really give me a jonesing for some serious Western action.. but I'm going to have to wait the extra year or two before they get around to releasing it for the PC... Ah well. c'est la vie.

The DRM on AP barely gives you a glance over. From the sounds of it, it's simple, smooth, non-invasive, and easy to deal with if anything screws up. You can't really compare it to the horror show that some DRM is these days... Although that's always a worrying yardstick to use.... "it's not as bad as other things" .. but seriously, I don't really see why people would have any problems with it. Especially after the whole "in 18-24 months we should be putting out a patch to remove the DRM."

Heh, I quite liked reading those "background descriptions" of Michael in the different "classes" (Field Operative, Soldier, Freelancer and the other one..). They definitely help push to try playing multiple different styles...

I could see the humour it was aiming for.. did put a light smile on my face.. but the music was a bit jarring for it. Still, whets the appetite for the different groups you might encounter in a couple of weeks..

Thats nothing compared to Belgium, bro. Belgium is ruled by the minority. Of course, don't you know according to current standards of political correctness and general soft-shell fuzzy thinking, the majority is always in the wrong. Because it's automatically prejudiced against any minority group. Really. Always. So the minority groups have to be the only unprejudiced group to make decisions. Honestly guv.

I'm sure we'd think of a few things... and most of them would even be legal.

As so many people do say, DRM can really depend on the type of DRM a game uses, and what sort of DRM people are used to... I mean, back in the day (oh for my youth...) the only DRM was either a serial key you typed in during install, or having to keep the cd in the drive (or even both..) . Then again, back in my reaaally youth, you had games that would prompt you now and then (sometimes in part of an in-game mini-game) to actually look through the manual for a specific page and type in that word, or select an icon or some sort of jibber-jabber like that... The internet opened up a wonderful wide world of DRM's that can be really annoying. Personally I'd steered clear of most games that required me to put in some third companies software, and create an account just to log in and play a single-player game that I'd bought.. and then I picked up GTAIV... oy vey.. that was an experience. Then I found I had to install Rockstar's Social Club doohickey.. put on Games for Windows stuff.. there I was thinking I could spend a happy few hours on christmas afternoon playing the shiny new game.... And instead I had to spend a few hours getting those "extras" installed (the joys of something glitching with something on my pc) and then having a dodgy internet connection that kept fluxing out as I tried to register so I could just login... That kind of set a sour tone. Then every time I hit play I had to go through ten minutes of running the social club, running games for windows, then getting into the game..... It's DRM Jim, but not as we like it.... Now we have the Ubisoft DRM as the complete boogeyman at the moment... It requires you to have a constant internet connection - for a game thats 1> single-player and 2> has no frikkin need of the internet apart from their DRM designs. That being, Ubisoft keep your save games... on their central servers rather then letting you keep them on your computer. The game you buy, and they don't let you keep your own saves.... So if you want to put your fresh new single-player game on the laptop while you travel... you can't use it. (okay, if you find a wifi hotspot, or want to pay to modem connect via your cellphone or the like..) but even then, if your internet connection goes dodgy you get dumped out of the game... Now that's why there's a whole heap of hate for Ubisoft DRM. Not everyone can guarantee a clean, smooth running internet connection. So why would you want to buy a game that doesn't even let you play it when you want it? On the current side of the equation, we have Alpha Protocol's declared DRM.. Unilock. 5 activations. That you can put on any computers you want to. You just need the internet connection to activate them, then no more worry. If you put it on a 6th, there's a nice option that offers to remove one of your previous activations.. Even if your computer wipes itself out before you can de-activate it, you can go to the Uniloc website and do it from them to open it up... and there's the mention that in a specific time frame, a patch will be out that will remove the DRM from the game.... All in all, that seems like a fairly fresh, simple, and (drumroll please) non-invasive way of handling it...

Of course, most of the trailers and teasers have shown Moscow (outside, covered in snow) or Saudi Arabia (weapons depot, lots of barren, desert style rock)... Lots of white background or that brownish-orange.... That's always going to throw perceptions out somewhat.. And personally, I've never really been bugged by the graphics in AP.. I'm just wanting to sit down and play the damn game after all this time

Actually you read a lot of positive comments on Bioware's games compared to other 'hardcore' RPG forums, and it seems that the crowd is very fair-minded here, with the occasional 'banal, boring, ****' comment overexaggeration. The only comments against Bioware fans I've seen it's for the excessive focus on romances of the community. Well, that and it's turned into a general forum in-joke to poke fun at the bioware threads and Uber-Fans ...

Although the nation is peaceful, we do tend to keep having troops sent out to help others in peace-keeping situations. There was something like only a single year of the entire 20th century where no British soldiers were killed somewhere in the world.. Most of the post-WW2 era was the mix of UN "peace-keeping" around the world and Irish troubles related..