Pidesco

At first I didn't know he was quite so deadly, and figured my unarmed skills might be enough.

Interesting stuff from The Guardian Notice how uneven the possible brackets towards the quarters are and can be.

Parkour.

Depends on what you mean by no combat. Do you mean all points into, say, Technical Aptitude, Stealth and Toughness? That's the only way in which you'd have a character who is unskilled at every kind of combat (4 guns, gadgets, martial arts). If that's the case, I'd say: (1) By going out of your way to create a character which is deliberately and radically poor at combat, well, you're asking for the game to hand you a smackdown; (2) Having no skills still doesn't prevent you from using weapons; Shadow Operative is king here, and you should have Brilliance as well, which gives you a huge advantage in outmaneuvring Brayko. Stealth to avoid his knives, get behind him, lob an incendiary grenade and explosion grenade (time it so 2nd explodes when his armour is down) and slam assault rifle at him. He's gone. I haven't done this, since I never made such a character, but once I did beat him on Hard with Stealth, grenades and SMGs alone, with zero skills in SMGs. So it was pretty close, I just had Overclock to help. In Veteran, I made a character who, by the time I reached Brayko, had maxed out Stealth and Technical Aptitude, while Martial Arts was about halfway in. I couldn't get near him with such skills because as soon as he took out his knives he'd knock off, at the very least, half my health. And the game was designed for such a character, by the way. It was downright easy, in fact. Except for the boss fights, of course. If it wasn't for the stealth glitch in that fight, I probably wouldn't have gotten through it. And even then it took ages to ping away at his health with the pistol.

How do you beat Brayko if you have created a stealth/no combat character?

All this talk about the graphics being gorgeous has me salivating for some screenies.

Who do you want Spain to get in the second round?

He's absolutely right, and it really surprised in a bad way that Alpha Protocol had boss fights like Brayko's.

NK world champions! Probably fake but awesome.

North Korea obviously didn't study Portugal tactics and mentality as they should. Portugal generally fares better against more open, attacking teams, than teams that close down and play ugly football. Frustration and limited strikers are generally Portugal's two big flaws, and North Korea proceeded to ignore them. Looking at how Portugal were performing before the first goal, North Korea might have stolen a point if they had been less adventurous. Still, kudos to the Koreans who kept running like madmen even when down by five goals. Also, it's been two years since last I saw Portugal producing this sort of silky moves. Feels nice even if against much weaker opposition.

Alan Parker - 10 Albatross - 11 Ali Shaheed - 10 Conrad Marburg - 9 Grigori Pazinhov - 10 Henry Leland - 10 Hong Shi - 11 Konstantin Brayko - 11 Madison Saint James - 1 Mina Tang - 10 (+1) Omen Deng - 11 Ronald Sung - 10 SIE - 11 Scarlet Lake - 13 Sean Darcy - 9 (-1) Sergei Surkov - 8 Sis - 12 Steven Heck - 12 Yancy Westridge - 10

Holland is starting to look like a contender. Theoretical quality, underwhelming performance, wins nevertheless. All the markings of a World Cup winner.

It's not failure when even your defeats move millions and millions of pounds.

While England will probably be underwhelming, I'm predicting the US to disappoint as well.

Yep...

Oh look, a TTLGer. Welcome!

Weren't the two main RPG features of Dungeon Siege a donkey to carry your loot and no loading times?

Pretty great.

I hope they change Dungeon Siege's basic design substantially....

It will be. So if that's the problem, go ahead and buy something beefier. Right now, ATI seems to be the best value for your money.

For that price get an ATI 5750. http://www.ebuyer.com/search?page=3&st...ow&limit=10

That's for the week ending on the 29th, apparently. Pretty impressive if those are numbers for just 2 days in Europe.

"Why Fidel, why??"

holy mother of god Where is that?

Kim Catrall was great in Big Trouble in Little China. That's all I got.