PrimeJunta

China hasn't been Maoist since Deng Xiaoping's slogan, To Become Rich Is Glorious. The Naxalites have other things on their mind than trolling message boards, too, so it'll be a while before there's a genuine Maoist presence here.

That would be hilarious, Russia nuking the place that gave them their name.

@Tale Er, I'm not exactly enthusiastic here. Hovering somewhere between giving up and nursing a tiny, remaining spark of hope. I guess we'll see when we'll see. The DLC and multiplayer are a bit worrying, also personally as I can't into multiplayer.

It's too bad France never got over the English invasion to rediscover the spirit of Toulouse. If they inherit their political culture and institutions from Edward III of England things are gonna be... difficult. Same bull****. Nothing's as easy to troll as a vatnik. Just another East European with delusions of nationalistic grandeur, Poland, Russia, Estonia, Finland, all cut from the same cloth. Russia Stronk!

Story never was a strong point for BioWare. I'd settle for "not facepalmingly awful." They have managed that much with Jade Empire and KOTOR at least. :musing: Their big problem is that they do light-hearted pretty well, but for some reason insist on doing grimdark which they're REALLY BAD at. The premise (exploring a new frontier) lends itself better to light-hearted space opera than the ZOMG the universe is going to end stuff in the original trilogy.

Oh dear.

DA:I had a whole bunch of problems, not least the endless fetch-me-20-of-this sidequests. My main beef with it though is the gameplay which is just plain dull, endlessly spamming the same attacks over and over, with the supposedly-climactic dragonfights just a matter of whittling down a mountain of hitpoints while dodging a repeating attack pattern. I'm hoping the core gameplay at least will be less dull (i.e., basically copying the ME2/3 gameplay which I found serviceable enough and certainly more fun than DA:I's). The world design, however, I liked. The environments felt organic, layered, and credible. The geology was believable (even if they overdid the basalt pipes), as was the plant life. The ruins were much more believable than in most such games, and the villages, strongholds, farms, hamlets and such felt like functioning villages, strongholds, farms, and hamlets. So that part I'm kind of mildly optimistic about. But yeah, definitely not a day 1 purchase. (I only got around to playing the ME's years after they came out too.)

This actually sounds... pretty cool. Much better premise for a swashbuckling space adventure than the original ME one. Who knows if it's real though, might be someone just making stuff up for the lulz.

It's too bad Russia never got over the Mongol invasion to rediscover the spirit of Novgorod. If you inherit your political culture and institutions from Chinggiz Khan things are gonna be... difficult.

The Obsidian boards are the cornerstone of the new imperialist psywar strategy. It's because of Alpha Protocol. Srsly though it'd be cool to see more Russians here. Even better if they're not vatniky.

I have a kind of a lovehate thing going with Mass Effect. It's one of those series that falls sooooo far short of what it could have been, yet has some really high points and memorable moments. A few of the characters are very cool, the gameplay in ME2 and 3 isn't bad at all, and some of the sub-story arcs are just about as good as it gets -- Tuchanka for example. And I also really dug the 'suicide mission' in ME2, and the way it tied up stuff in a neat little ribbon. Yet it has the unbelievably boneheaded things everybody loves to harp about that I'm not going to go into here. So basically where DA:I has gotten me to more or less give up on that franchise (and it gets me this close to giving up on BW altogether), I still hold a smidgen of hope for ME. Not least because the straight-up cover shooter gameplay is better suited for the actiony cinematic RPG's BW likes to make these days than swords-n-sorcery-with-cooldowns. Meaning, they don't actually have to dumb down the gameplay because it's already dumb yet remains quite fun in its way. So they could instead focus on the things they screwed up in the original trilogy. Also I'm pretty sure they know they boo-booed with the narrative, given the reception of the ME3 endings. Namely: story and world design. The ME trilogy story just made no bleeping sense on any level, and every place in the galaxy looked either like a mall or a bombed-out parking garage. The lead writer for ME4 is Chris Schlerf, whose major claim to fame is Halo 4. I haven't played that so I don't know if the writing is any good. The art director is Joe McMillan, who's an ME trilogy veteran. The change of lead writer is welcome at least; it gives hope that he'll pay more attention to narrative and setting consistency, and, just perhaps, edit better, while retaining the good qualities of ME's writing -- generally well-flowing dialog and well-characterized characters. As to the art director, I've no way of knowing if the samey sameness in the OT represents his (lack of) vision or is simply a consequence of limited resources and having to reuse them a lot. Nevertheless, less hopeful there. Any of you good folk have some more inside beef on the people involved? Healthy pessimism is healthy as it makes for fewer disappointments, but should we write this one off straight away or is there hope?

If you really can't cope without a tank, recruit one for the interim.

Yeah but it was a secret ballot. They're supposed to adhere to party discipline on those.

To be fair, rogue moles can be problematic. Mine just went and voted Conservative.

Turns only pass when you complete quests. Just farting around won't advance the game.

I'm not OLD. I'm 43. (44, next week.) (If you looked further down the page BTW I would like to point out that the secondary definition of any word in Internet slang is 'to have sex with.') (Edit: unless it's the primary definition.)

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shoop

Yes?

Somebody shoop Josh Sawyer, Colin McComb, and Jordan Weisman onto this edit: CMcC is actually already in there so only need to do Josh and Jordan

+1 on getting it looked at ASAP but I too would put my money on it not being cancer, so I wouldn't start referring to it as "the melanoma" just yet. Let us know what they said though m'kay?

It would be stupid to claim that Hitler had nothing to do with socialism. The word is right in his party's name. He was, however, a staunch anti-Communist.

Individualism over collectivism doesn't seem to do much better. The British Raj alone makes the victims of Communism look like small potatoes. Edit: Ah, I almost forgot: obviously they don't count since they're brown.

Real men write with Vigor. http://vigor.sourceforge.net/ http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/00jan/20000104.html

That was awesome. FTFY

IMO one of the touchstones of a well-functioning polity is orderly and regular transfer of power with significant churn in the governing elite. If you get a quarter-century of Stalin, or, for that matter, Bush/Clinton with an interlude of Obama, that's a pretty good sign that something ain't right. Edit: Page 31, WTF?