Drowsy Emperor

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. A bit too confusing for its own good. Then there's the whole anti Russian bias, with them leaving corpses left and right throughout the movie. Otherwise its okay.

What are military bases without consolidated ground? - just outposts in hostile territory. The point of the fight against Taliban is to break them down and gain a pacified colony, so that US forces can be diminished or shuffled around without danger as needed. That is why the US can't leave, because the current puppet government wouldn't last a week - thereby rendering the whole war effort worthless. Also that doesn't mean the US isn't currently getting what it wanted - its the media who are playing up the whole: "war with a clear victory" angle. Its very opportune to hold Afghanistan even with the occasional dead soldiers. The overall cost is small compared to the strategic gain.

Every occupation of Afghanistan is always about its strategic position, a very important land route and crossroad through Asia. Real, tangible control over Afghanistan is every military strategist's wet dream. I don't know how important it is from a trade perspective but I imagine its far from insignificant. @Gifted: I'm very much aware of what US politicians said while they were preparing the invasion but it would be very silly to take those things at face value. From a military perspective terrorism is insignificant, the taliban irrelevant. No one cares if they set of a few bombs, more people die from the flu every day than from terrorist activity. The actual threat to the US is an exaggeration, fittingly used in the wake of Sep. 11 to gain support for the war, which as far as Afghanistan is concerned is always led for geo-strategic reasons.

I'm interested in DS only if it has real substance. If its only claim to fame is a high difficulty, then who cares.

Osama was caught in Pakistan, most of the Sept. 11 terrorists were originally from Saudi Arabia. So much for your Afghan Al Quaeda. Besides, I hope you don't really think the US mobilized its forces and such immense resources because of something as insignificant as terrorist activity, a few bums hanging out in caves with delusions of global jihad.

That's a bit silly. The ending is what it is, changing it now would mean they didn't have a clue what they were doing the first time around. But I still don't get why they (the fans) care so much. Its not 2001: A Space Odyssey, whatever ending they slap on it won't make it any better as a whole. But it does show they have bad taste when they automatically cry for a happy end. One could almost predict that a pessimistic ending would be epic fail after 60+ hours of sucking up to the player and telling him he's the second coming. I mean, Mass Effect, game of the generation? decade? the new "star wars"? seriously? If its a joke, its in bad taste.

The accident being foreign troops on their soil.

I just googled win 8 sys req and I must say I was pleasantly surprised! I took it for granted that it was going to be even more demanding than Win7.

Were you people seriously expecting a worthwhile ending to the ME trilogy, after it being obvious with ME2 that the story is the least of their concerns and that they're willing to tumble it around with no real regard to sense and continuity? It was either going to be Shepard riding off into the sunset or what you got. Consider yourselves lucky it wasn't the first (creatively bankrupt) option.

If it doesn't have quicksave its not fit for the PC gaming master race.

Good that the PC only guys will get to play this. Especially if your a masochist. If it gets quicksave it'll be much easier.

I tried out Odin's Sphere although I still have GrimGrimoire to finish and all I can say is: wow! The graphics are phenomenal and even the animation isn't bad.

Bite your tongue, Myth rules.

3.5 million suckers born every minute

I'm still on XP and I'm not changing it until the last possible moment. I hate Win 7 but 8 is a whole different story. Its ridiculous, sacrificing two decades of sensible development in favour of a few unnecessary visual gimmicks. Microsoft is trying really really hard to make it impossible to go under the hood of their OS and tweak things. As we all know that's the only way to get their software to work properly, unless you're willing to wait 3-4 years for them to sort out most of the problems they ship it with. I sincerely hope they crash and burn ASAP.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-03-04-retrospective-baldurs-gate-1-and-2 Lovely BG retrospective

Ultimately, it appears that Lucas had nothing to do with anything good in SW.

Nope, I wasn't even aware of it. After looking at the trailer I'm definitely interested, something nice to look forward to in the next few weeks. Thanks

I was going to try Odin Sphere next, I don't have any of the other platforms. Their 2D work is really head and shoulders above the competition.

They already are, the situation has them rounding up control of the middle east through the recent revolutions, trying to crack Iran, surround Russia with the "rocket shield" missiles, check the growth of the Chinese navy and cut off their resources in Africa and the Middle East. Its effectively a full scale global (cold)war and its intensifying with each passing year. It will intensify even more as the US is trying to advance very far, very quickly - I suspect because the hawks in Washington are realising that time is slowly but surely running out and in favour of other states. I think you just hate democracy and freedom. I hope you're not serious.

I may hate anime in general, but I'll take my hat off to a job well done any day of the week. GrimGrimoire looks like 50 artists were ritually sacrificed in its creation. And I'll always love good 2D art over anything 3D. One of the great tragedies of gaming is that 2D graphics were dropped just as they were starting to look phenomenal in higher resolutions, in favour of the hideous, blocky early 3D games. It really is obscene, how good even the late stuff was when PS3 and X360 were already in full swing. PS3 was sucking dirt with its early releases while the PS2 games were still dripping quality. I was recently surprised by how much good stuff I had missed, having dropped the console back in 2008-2009. Even some of the bad games were very innovative by today's standards.

GrimGrimoire, a 2D strategy for the PS2. Excellent game. Some of the prettiest 2D graphics ever made with beautifully animated sprites and environments. You play this schoolgirl in a magical academy in the course of 5 days during which the big bad is released and kills everyone including her. Then she's transported back to the first day to replay those 5 days in ever increasing levels of difficulty. There are 4 schools of magic whose units follow the standard rock paper scissors format. You summon them, upgrade them and spam them at the AI, utilising the specific abilities of each unit. The controls are well adapted to the purpose, the audio is great and even the story is interesting. Dragon vs Chimera Fairies vs Imp

They already are, the situation has them rounding up control of the middle east through the recent revolutions, trying to crack Iran, surround Russia with the "rocket shield" missiles, check the growth of the Chinese navy and cut off their resources in Africa and the Middle East. Its effectively a full scale global (cold)war and its intensifying with each passing year. It will intensify even more as the US is trying to advance very far, very quickly - I suspect because the hawks in Washington are realising that time is slowly but surely running out and in favour of other states.

That's right, but how many other RPG's bother with LGBT rights? In fact, explicit support for such things and other political ideologies is an exception, not a rule in games. The standard explanation from BW is "that the fans want it". That's rubbish - the majority of fans customers are heterosexual males and they either don't want that sort of content or are indifferent to it. The other explanation you're going to hear is that its "progressive, giving people the opportunity to express themselves". That's even more unbelievable, coming from a company that's really only interested in making money. So it can either be a lame attempt to get even more sales by pandering to minorities (which doesn't make much statistical sense - to go to such lengths to please the odd LGBT gamer) or something else, like a personal crusade by some individuals in Bioware. And when you hear the way they defend it, it really sounds like the latter. I find the idea of somebody using a game to push their personal ideology around intensely annoying. I wouldn't have paid any attention to it as I've stopped buying BW games a while ago, but the silly article above got me all riled up.

God, do they dumb down the matter. Besides, those gender and sexuality issues are really starting to erode Bioware's credibility. When Helper was harassed on her twitter account, it was cringing to see her write that people were jealous of her because she got a vagina [and a job in the industry] and not them. Seriously, was that her best answer? She should has come out of this mess as a victim, not as a jackass. If I'm talking about this, it's because I think this is the same problem here. (I hope) People don't care about homosexuality, they just don't like the whole marketing that has been built around this and how it shoved it down our throats... ahem. It's like the whole thing is engulfing every negativity around Bioware. People are not that insecure. For Forbes to play this angle like Helper did mean they don't even try to understand why is the Internet reacting like that. And this article will certainly fuel the hate more than anything. What a trainwreck. You just have to read video games webcomics to see how fine this marketing worked by the way. So far, I checked Penny Arcade, Virtual Shackles, VG Cats, Nerfnow and another one whose name I forgot. The random ME drawing is always about Shepard's sexuality or a random character's sex-appeal. Shepard is half the time, insane. Edit: Hey, Forbes did a second update, doubting what they said earlier. Well, all for the best. Its hilarious how seriously people are taking Mass Effect. Its like discussing the philosophy of Independence Day and the nuances of Will Smith's character. Besides there's something wrong with championing gender rights in a game which has you kill people/creatures half of its playing time. Its like "gay rights are the spice of our mass murder simulator". So homophobic boys are bad, bad, but shooting everything "for great justice" is fine and dandy. Just goes to show that the game creators can be as juvenile and as irrational as their audience. If they wanted a sophisticated response they should make a sophisticated game. Instead they made a room temp IQ shooter wrapped in a blockbuster plot, throw in a few political issues "of the day" and consider themselves champions of liberty and free thinking.