Drowsy Emperor

They're just playing dumb. The huge amount of hate SCII got over the same issue was obvious for anyone to see. As usual the pirates are going to have the most fun. They'll get a nicely cracked game without all the online garbage, and it will probably work better too.

Amazon sale stats bring a tear to my eye:

That's an excellent idea. How's the wait for the Mass Effect 2 Ultimate Edition going? I'm doing the same with DA II. And the approach works perfectly if your interest is sufficiently marginal that you're willing to accept the absence of an ultimate edition as a sign that you weren't meant to play the game.

The way they show you aryans drinking champagne in the first class, while you're crammed in economy between the fat dude and the screaming kids on a 20 hour intercontinental Swissair flight sure as hell amounts to a conspiracy. Wallet apartheid is what it is.

In my experience, the dickwad making these decisions in most corporations is not a lawyer. The poor bastards have enough work without googling for random words related to products. It's kind of like gun control. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Lawyers don't make idiotic lawsuits, the people who they work for make the decisions. What do you do for a living again?

I found the ME games to have the most boring, predictable and unvaried action gameplay without a shred of tactics/fine aiming skills some shooters demand or at least mindless fun of the GTA sort. In fact ME played like RPG autocombat only you had to babysit the main character.

Why do you think Bioware is pushing all their games more and more towards action games then? Its still not going to happen, because they suck at action gameplay - its nowhere near as intense/interesting as what the competition is offering. They'll never manage to push the concept of a shooter/RPG so far to make it sell like CoD, which is why I criticized this approach from day one. But, who cares.

Its never going to happen. RPG games are a niche market. Maybe ToR, although its not likely.

Even the EA suits have enough brains to realize that affiliating Bioware (a successful company and name) with EA (which has a mixed reputation at best), does damage to the former and nothing for the latter. The only intelligent option is to have them in your pocket but under their own name and doing their own thing.

No great surprise there, they couldn't really do a BGII scale improvement with Witcher 2. In fact it sounds just like I was expecting it to be, better in the quantifiable stuff (graphics, choices etc.) and worse in the unquantifiable (atmosphere etc.). I always felt The Witcher was a one shot thing. A great game, but without enough space to improve for a drastically superior sequel. I still respect CDProjekt for listening to old school fans and critics, unlike some developers I know. I'll play it some day. When I get a new PC.

So what's the verdict on the Witcher 2? I can't play it and most of my friends say the atmosphere and story aren't as good as the first time around, but the gameplay is supposedly better.

Yeah, I see a lot of soon to be impoverished parents there.

150$ lol, they have to be kidding

That sucks. Never had that problem myself though. Still playing Stronghold Crusader. I really like the game, it doesn't have the hectic pace of RTS games and the whole castle building is a lot of fun.

Bioware having a dedicated 2d studio has the potential to be either awesome, or the factory of saddest facebook franchise knock-off games in the history of mankind. Don't choke: I agree.

No but professional football is a job done for money. A game shouldn't be the first, and you ain't gonna see the second unless you're in the top 10.

Not that I disagree but isn't that an indication of a problem with it? If spectating on a free stream is more fun than playing why buy the game in the first place? Its not so much that it isn't fun its just inherited a lot of fanatical players from SC I that you can't hope to compete with. Being serious about SCII demands too much time and stress for most people.

Quite true. The actual playing at that level of skill and training to do so is a bloody chore.

Its not the best RTS, its the only pure RTS in years barring the never ending WWII crap that's shoveled on our heads. The genre is practically dead in favor of various hybrid options. SCII is a good game, I ain't saying otherwise. But one week is how much I played it overall. If the next expansion offers a more involved story and changes some units around I might be interested again, if only to bring back the RTS nostalgia. RTS has always been a dominantly multiplayer genre, uninspired single player is practically a standard feature of most RTS's. As I don't play competitively SCII really only had the campaign to draw me in and it failed, more or less. Either that or exceptionally appealing graphics and gameplay like Age of Empires II, Dawn of War, Homeworld...

I like the aesthetics, he's kept it very close to the first one. Watched Source Code. Bleh. Although it is much better than that Inception garbage, which it resembles, to an extent. Also, watched Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. Great stuff.

It's Samuel Barber's " " .. a very beautiful piece of music and I've never seen a more appropriate use of it than Homeworld.. it really makes the situation so much more powerful. Yes, its perfect. If games ever came close to being art that was then: It makes 90% of sci fi films I've seen look like the work of amateurs.

I am glad to hear that. Having decided to forego the game in spite of thinking it would be a masterpiece (as Starcraft I was), it is, nonetheless, good to hear that perhaps I didn't miss all that much. Right, so Emperor said so, and you're already satisfied so easily? How about you get some more diverse opinions/reviews before you write off a game? Either way, SCII is superb (imho, of course). Well my beef with it was as follows: 1. cliche upon cliche in the campaign - characters, plot twists, overall storyline etc. resulting in the game being completely predictable at every turn (my biggest gripe overall) 2. missions that revolved around using a single new unit 3. WCIII comic style gaudy graphics and animation negatively impacted the atmosphere 4. weak visual unit design (mothership, protoss carriers, humpty-dumpty with grenade launcher [marauder] etc.) 5. uninspired units (flamethrower buggy? please) All this caused me to lose interest quickly.

I loved Prague and Venice. Rome is great as well. Vienna, although splendid, left me cold. Florence is nice for the art lover, dunno why I wasn't taken with it all that much. Verona didn't really impress me all that much. The most important thing in my experience is to be well informed and see any city on your own terms - avoiding being part of a large tourist group which will rush you through all the sights. In short, don't visit the city you're dying to see until you have the cash to do it at your leisure. Better not to visit at all than to barge through everything. Also I've heard St. Petersburg praised by everyone whose ever been there.

You didn't miss much there, SCII wears out very quickly.

I disagree. I rather want Valve taking their time (Valvetime) and release a new HL that had the same impact as HL did in 1998 and HL2 did in 2004, than releasing just another upgrated HL2. Besides, one can hope they also have other new IPs in development. The "miserable treatiment" was them being so tight lipped about it - not the time they're taking to do it. Which is perfectly fine with me.