Phosphor

News programs are suffering in viewer audience, due mainly to news being available all day on the internet. People don't sit down and watch the 6 or 11 o'clock news as much anymore because they don't need to in order to get their news for the day. The television news industry is trying to find ways of keeping a viewer audience, and news-as-entertainment is a method at or near the top of the list of ways to keep an audience. It may not be journalistically honourable, but when it comes to television ratings, notions like honour and integrity are pretty much tossed out the window.

CNN strikes me as essentially centrist with a leftist angle. But then, I live in Canada, a place most Americans seem to think is comprised of socialist commies

That's pretty much what I was thinking. It seems such a hypocritical item; the left accuses the right of censorship and not letting views be heard, yet here we have an item to do just that. It's perhaps somewhat ironic that the left, supposedly the free-thinkers and such, would have members create an item to alleviate some free-thinking or free-acting for capitalistic gain. As Oerwinde says, you can just not watch FOX News. It's this kind of thing that makes the left-leaning people be taken less seriously.

Brendan Smith, a PR fellow for Atari. He seems to be the lucky one who deals with D&D topics.

The thread was locked because it had very quickly become an off-topic spam thread. Keep this one on-topic and it will remain open.

Hasn't MS said that the next XBox will be fully compatible with previous XBox titles? So when the new one launches, you'll still have access to the old library of titles?

That was hilarious. Lee talking very seriously about it, and sounding very sinister, and then Jackson's "smile and nod" response.. "Ok, I'll trust you to know what is best" kind of thing.

Just PM a moderator and we'll take care of it. For future reference, when you get a MySQL error message (or the like), don't repost, the post does go through.

You guys have had this very same conversation before. And on that note, that conversation has pretty much ground this thread to a halt, so I'm locking it.

Got it to work - closing it with the tilde key does the trick, rather than using the mimimize or close boxes.

I have a question about the console and it's use. When I use the console, the game freezes up, and I'm wondering if that's supposed to happen and is there a way to get around it?

I have to admit, it looks pretty fun; I'll keep an eye out for it. As for the name change, Xenus sounds like a low-budget sci-fi alien shooter thing, whereas Boiling Point has a stronger, more impressive tone and implication.

I've never seen a game get universally good reviews. Every game I've bought has both good and bad reviews; the trick is, if you care about reviews, is to find ones that you consider trustworthy and who's explanations of criticism (and praise) you feel are accurate to your tastes.

That's why the cuts were made for the theatrical version. The extended editions are clearly more for the LOTR fans, and Jackson has said as much in interviews.

Well, you get more of him in the book of course. And the extended films add more of his character throughout (via "flashbacks"), so that's nice. Yeah, in the theatrical version, that was a bit... convenient. The extended version makes it work a bit more by at least giving more background to the situation.

The French woman? The only French woman I know is the voice on the recorded signal. Did they find the actual person? What's her story?

Well, I think this thread has collapsed upon itself.

It was a good scene to have in; the way the extended films fleshed out Boromir's role was very nice and very important, I think. The more character pieces restored, the better.

I think it's because of the large amount of well-written text that I remember the game so well, and the reason so much of it stays with me. Ironically, I tend to remember visuals more than words (spoken or read), but in the case of PS:T, when compared in memory to other cRPGs, it lingers more strongly than the others, even those played more recently. Whatever one feels about the quality of the text, good or not, it's much better than most, if not all, cRPG text and dialogue. As a literary achievment I wouldn't say it's anything notable, but in terms of cRPG text, it's extraordinary.

I keep missing episodes, so I'm a bit foggy on what exactly is going on. I understand the pregnant girl was abducted, but by whom? What happened - can anyone give me a quick rundown of events? Last night's was pretty good; the hatch-capsule thing definately looks early space program era, which would coincide roughly with the age of the French transmission, I think. Though I wonder if the island is actually built atop a complex, which would perhaps answer why no-one is looking for them - the island doesn't exist on any maps, so the assumption would be the plane crashed in the middle of the ocean, or just disappeared over the ocean, a sort of Bermuda Triangle type of thing - as well as perhaps explaining why the compass given to Sayid by Locke doesn't read properly, the metal construct is screwing with the magnetic field. If you try and use a compass in a car, for example, it won't read properly because the car interferes with the magnetic field. If they are atop some mechanical, electricity-using structure, the magnetic field will be interefered with and the compass will read wrong. I'd like to know if Sayid compared the compass from Locke with his own hand-made compass, and if they read the same. In other areas, I thought in the Korean woman's backstory it was revealed that her husband caught her speaking English, so why is she so afraid of him finding out? Perhaps I'm mistaken... Anyways. The previews for the next episode are always the same. "Next week on Lost: someone wants something from someone else, they yell and hit each other!"

Fallout. I didn't have low expectations, but I did expect one of those games that only a few people like and loudly proclaim it's virtues; one of those "if you don't like it, you just don't understand it" type of things. To my surprise, it was a very engaging and enjoyable game that, for the most part, lived up to the hype. Vampire Bloodlines has also been a most pleasant surprise. I had expected a gothy melodramatic thing but Troika managed to avoid that (for the most part). Even the soundtrack, which I expected to not like, worked well. I wouldn't sit down and listen to it (I outgrew/got sick of most of that kind of music a few years ago), but in the game it fit nicely.

True. If great amounts of text alone made something a great achievment, these boards would have to be included in the canon of great literary works. It's the story, characters and unfolding of events contained and delivered by that great amount of text that matter, and in the case of Torment that text did an excellent job in presenting a gripping, intriguing and fairly unique (for cRPGs) story and character play experience. Does that make it the greatest game ever? No, a great game needs more than a story, and while Torment had a great story, the gameplay mechanics were lacking. Still, it's one of the better games I've played and is the closest to a "more than a video game" experience I've had in playing computer games.

Thread title changed to more accurately reflect the thread topic.

Philippa Boyens (one of the screenwriters), made a comment a while ago about doing a "chronological cut" of the film, that recuts the movie so as to follow the exact chronology, from the battle with Sauron, to the finding of the ring by Deagol and so on and so forth, in exact order of events. Not sure if that's really going to happen or not though, or if it was just her thinking aloud in public. Last night I started watching the ROTK extras, and there apparently were scenes filmed that followed up on the other characters after everything was over. They showed small glimpses of them; I want those back in the film! PJ comments lots in the interviews over all the films that the main story for the films was Frodo taking the ring to Mount Doom, and so everything else was secondary to that story, so when cuts needed to be made, that's where they looked. However, I always found the parts that focused on the other characters more enjoyable than the parts that focused on Frodo; I found the other characters more interesting. So I'd very much like to see an "extended" Extended Edition with the stories of the other characters finished.

If you're not interested in finding out the answer, why ask the question?