~Di

Oohh, what a great lay-up for more Gothic preaching! In Gothic you play an unknown dude who gets thrown in jail for an unknown reason (you never find out if he is guilty or not either), and your only goal is to break out of jail. That you happen to overthrow an evil demon in the process is a mere side effect of your escape plan. You are never the chosen one, never a "scion of god" (eww!), you're just a petty, nameless criminal. I love that. I actually prefer these more personal stories. I am SO SICKKKKKK of playing the Chosen One!! Not so fast. In Gothic 3 you are "The Decider". You are the one chosen to decide which god will rule, and which gods will not. That's pretty damned Chosen One if you ask me!

Otherwise known as snideness and sarcasm, which is why you have to keep pretending they were jokes when you get called on them.

You should stop. Clearly, you're not very good at them.

*sigh* I give up.

Folks around here always disagree with what is "happy" and what is "satisfying", because those terms mean different things to different people. ME1 did not have a "happy" ending for me. I'd left a dear friend to be vaporized, much of the Citidel is in ruins, thousands of people are dead and the damned reapers are still out there. Is that happy? Hell, no. Is it satisfying, oh yes, for me it was. Now if every one of my people had been programmed to die as I watched, the Citidal had been blown to ruins while the reaper chittered with glee, and the final scene showed a dead Shepard floating in zero gravity space, I would have broken the disk with a hammer and never bought another ME game again. For me, that is the difference between "happy", "satisfying" and "unacceptable". For others it will be different. Some would love an ending where everyone dies, and the hero fails to accomplish the mission. That's just not me.

Nooooooooooooooo! *sob*

OMG, that looks awesome! (I know, I just can't help being an optimist!)

A depressing end game from Bioware? Never. If I put 100 hours into a game series, I expect a happy ending. I'd really be ticked off by anything else. Me, too. If my character loses blood and sweat trying to create miracles to save something or someone, and has been doing so for many years (since ME 1), the ending of the trilogy had better not be that everything she worked so hard to save was destroyed. That means her efforts and existance were all for nothing, and that is definitely not what the average RPG gamer wants when starting on a big adventure.

You were being optimistic? I know. This is hardly the forum where one can be optimistic without being instantly denounced as a fanboi or loser! Sometimes I get excited and forget...

The only good performance I've ever heard out of Jennifer Hale was Eternal Darkness. Anyway, I thought the direction they took the second game in was absolutely moronic, too. The reapers went from an imposing hyper-advanced machine race to a pack of ****ing fools who didn't even have a viable plan B. Bitch, bitch, bitch. How unexpected. Jennifer Hale is awesome.

I'm actually excited to hear about Mass Effect 3. I came here because I thought other people would be excited about it too... what was I thinking?? Of course earth is going to be the next reaper target. I mean, Duh. First Shephard kills their buddy. So they to partake of the species' greatness. Then Shepard kills it too. So by now, reapers are out for human blood. Where's the most human blood? Duh... Bah, some people here are so negative about every game that it's a wonder they even bother to play games in the first place. Plus I'm pissed that Jennifer Hale didn't win the VGA award for best female voice acting.

If true, this is quite sobering and disconcerting: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/as...ar-2145018.html

Really? Feel free to back it up with links/facts or stop spreading this BS. Ah, yes. My favorite attack-dog bully never disappoints. So viciously predictable. Indeed it is. Oddly enough, the reason one low-ranking intelligence private was able to access all of this information was because of 9/11. Interesting discussion on CNN (television, not web site) that described how after 9/11, investigations showed that if individual information gleaned by all our separate little governmental agencies, territorial buggers that they are, had been available to all of them, we might have been able to consolidate knowledge and stop the attacks. So in our infinite wisdom, we combined access for all those agencies... but apparently forgot to upgrade the safeguards. Hence, a rebellious kid outside of Baghdad in a basically unsupervised intelligence tent was able to access information from the military, state department, CIA, etc., and download it all on a CD disk marked "Lady Gaga." We will now, no doubt, return to encapsulating all of our agencies so they may again pee on the wall to mark their territories, and never have to share their stuff again. Totally swell.

This is jaw dropping. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactiv...ables-wikileaks I know the whole idea was just to smear the USA and try to destroy our relations with allies, but look at the international dirty laundry that's been hung out to dry. No wonder Hillary was frantically giving heads-up to half the world. Even the one-line description of contents show that half the Arab countries on the planet have been begging the US to bomb Iran, and there was a secret EU plot to boycott Ahmadinejad's inaugaration.

The publishing community is quite united. The Authors Guild sued Google, and got massive reparations for books they offered illegally online. And I suspect you'd be hard-pressed to find any game developer on the planet who loves piracy, because they just want to, like, have more peeps enjoy the product they've created even if they can't pay for it. Of course the publishers are quite united, because they live out of another people creative work publishers != authors... here is some prime example how a free to download thing actually makes more money, than signing in with a publisher... Publishers do not belong to The Authors Guild. Authors with specific publishing credits do. The Authors Guild sued Google on behalf of its members. As for publishers being the bad guys, there's no other way I could have personally typed up and sold 7 million copies of my books in 30 different languages without the publishing and distribution talents of my publishing house. Nowadays, anyone can slap a story on the internet and claim to be an "author". Writing hard-copy books is quite a bit different. And of course, publishers will only sign authors who they believe can write a work of fiction that will have mass appeal. My publisher earned every penny of profit they might have made off me after the hundreds of thousands of dollars they put into printing, translating and distributing my work. That still doesn't mean that any clown with a scanner and a web site should have the right to rip me off.

The publishing community is quite united. The Authors Guild sued Google, and got massive reparations for books they offered illegally online. And I suspect you'd be hard-pressed to find any game developer on the planet who loves piracy, because they just want to, like, have more peeps enjoy the product they've created even if they can't pay for it.

by "copied" you mean didn't buy it? because as far as writers go (the real ones), they don't care, the more people read it the better, right? or am I alone in this? We sure as hell DO care. It means money out of my pocket, and copying, scanning or xeroxing any copyright-protected book is illegal.

Yeah, because it doesn't friggin' matter if Afgani's are dying because of the leaks posted on the web. It only matters that Americans are brutal ****, and Di in particular is a Fox News Junkie, even though she hasn't seen more than six minutes of Fox News in the past five years. She isn't a European, she isn't an Australian, so she must be some kind of right-wing nutcase, despite the fact that she hasn't voted republican in a decade and is an avowed atheist. And God forbid she post an opinion on this forum, because everyone knows that as an American female she must be a dedicated right-winger, despite the fact that she has spent the past decade railing against the illegal preemptive invasion of Iraq as an illegal war based upon lies and deceit. She is Di... she is American, she is a female... therefore, she must be a brain-washed idiot. Your condescending insult of people with your stereotypes and pompous superiority complex because they aren't YOU, aren't from your so-very-perfect societies, make me glad that although I live in an imperfect country with a government I frequently disagree with, at least I don't live in a country that ignores its imperfections in order to scapegoat others to make myself feel important in a world where I know that I don't really matter. What a cruel bunch of xenophobic bullies you are. I'm actually sorry that the internet came to exist. Before that happened, I actually thought that I liked Australians and western Europeans because I didn't know what self-indulgent blame-mongering pricks they were. I have now been enlightened.

I frankly don't understand why NZ has the expectation that they have some kind of entitlement to the location and/or actors of NZ simply because the original LOTR trilogy was filmed there. Warner has no requirement to film the prequel there, especially when they are facing boycotts and costly delays by union interference. It seems a bit of the-USA-company-sucks whining to me, actually.

Well, it hasn't taken long for Wikileaks documents to spark the taking of lives. http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/02/taliban...-wikileaks.html Taliban Seeks Vengeance in Wake of WikiLeaks Leaked U.S. Intel documents listed the names and villages of Afghan collaborators

New Zealand law allows collective bargaining. Reference (please note: .govt.nz in URL) Well, a New Zealander contributed to the NYT article, but if he was wrong in reporting that "The producers and some New Zealand officials said such bargaining would violate the country

That's hardly the whole story, but bottom line, it was the union affiliated with NZ actors that called for an international boycott. If the Aussies had their hands up NZ's rear using them as puppets, it's because the NZ actors gave informed consent. Annnnd it's gonna cost them. A less biased and more complete overview of the mess can be found here... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/business....html?src=busln ... or just about anywhere on the web that doesn't originate in either the NZ or Australian press. Me, I don't care where they shoot the flicks. I do know that if I wanted to be in the film, I wouldn't be flinging my "weight" around talking about international boycotts. Now that the feces has hit the windmill, both unions are suddenly willing to revoke the boycotts and are begging Warner executives to talk to them. Ahem. Methinks the damage has been done, and Warners is scouting greener and more film-friendly pastures as we speak. Warners has made several good faith gestures over the months waiting for the Aussies and NZ actors to come to terms with New Zealand law, which does not allow collective bargaining. There's no shortage of stupidity to be found here, more than enough to spread around to all the players in this international extortion attempt. Don't think other big studios around the globe have not noticed this ridiculous situation. I'm thinking that it'll be dry pickings for NZ and Aussie actors outside of their own backyards for a long time to come.

LOL, NZ actors' union shoots itself in the head with a bunch of new demands, and NZ newspapers blame Warner Brothers? That's rich! Rich as in not what the actors in NZ will after Warner moves to the lovely British countryside to film. There must be something in the water down there that creates uncontrollable self-destructive behavior in otherwise sane humans.

First of all, a warning. Please don't take a newspaper's sensationalized, out-of-context version which was clearly designed to bash the US as gospel. Interpretation and context is the key, and it's a key that apparently some European media outlets have gleefully tossed away. An example from another forum I frequent. The OP, a UK citizen living in Europe, openly dispises America and literally was chortling with outrage that went something like this: "FRAGO242 is a US military order, which was given to instruct US troops not to investigate or prevent war crimes in Iraq. It comes out of the latest WIKI Leaks documents. It dispells the myth that we did something good in Iraq. We did not liberate the Iraqi people from the brutality of Saddam, we simply changed the source of their suffering. US troops stood and watched as men were tortured with electricity and beatings." Then came a reply from someone quite knowledgeable of FRAGO242...and the context in which it was issued: "This is the impact of Frago 242. A frago is a "fragmentary order" which summarises a complex requirement. This one, issued in June 2004, about a year after the invasion of Iraq, orders coalition troops not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as the abuse of detainees, unless it directly involves members of the coalition. Where the alleged abuse is committed by Iraqi on Iraqi, "only an initial report will be made

I really like BioWare games. Does that make me a bad person?