Agiel

Having just graduated from uni with a degree in Fine Arts, I find myself back in it reading the memoirs of Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31934/31934-h/31934-h.htm

I'm curious as to whether your retinue will ride on their own mounts or the AI followers have to follow the party leader by hoofing it on foot with rubber-banding AI, Bethesda-style.

Make a point of playing this one (even if it isn't necessarily much of a 4X if you were that hardcore of a purist). You won't regret it.

I'll never forget the time when my roommate's pet scorpion gave birth to dozens of tiny little scorpions and the momma had all of them riding on her back (not my image). "Go forth and multiply, my little death machines." You gotta figure that giant stinger tail hovering ominously over them is one hell of a behavioural aide: "Hey! quiet down back there, or else somebody gonna get a hurt real bad!"

For those who missed it and still retain some fondness for TF2, there's this:

Well part of the reason why the tank armies of the worlds stuck with the 120/125mm guns was because the increase in caliber size decreased the number of rounds a tank could carry. In my experience with Steel Beasts even with the 22 ready rounds available to the M1A1+ and the 18 for the Leo 2s you had to make every shot count, especially against a numerically superior foe (and in the case of the Central Front of the notional Cold War gone Hot, that the Warsaw Pact forces boasted superior numbers is a masterpiece of understatement). Though prototypes were developed for the Abrams CATTB and the Leopard 3 using the new 140mm gun, since the NATO forces had only just began fielding the 120mm in wide numbers it was decided it was better to improve the ammunition for these guns rather than seeking increased firepower through an increase in caliber. Another reason was that 140mm rounds would put more stress upon the human loader (for western tanks), and though the Soviets experimented with upguns for their own tanks it was determined that the cost and technical constraints were too great, as the new round meant newer and sturdier autoloaders, dramatically re-designed turrets to accommodate them, and even newer hulls and engines to retain the same mobility previous designs of tanks had.

I'm a big military nut and I generally don't get worked up about those things so long as I keep a proper perspective about these "mainstream" games. Hell, even in DCS which is about as hardcore of a military game as can get you'll see people flying A-10s and Russian Su-27s with Canadian and Greek liveries alongside Second World War vintage Focke Wulf 190s and (soon) Korean-era F-86 Sabres. I think the bigger issue I have is when some people claim to be informed about these matters based upon their experiences in Battlefield and CoD.

I don't know about you Keyrock, but I found the actual quest to lift the curse to be the coolest quest in the game. The atmosphere was outstanding and I don't recall having enormous amounts of trouble fighting the Draug. However, I believe the person who designed the first fight with Letho ought to be drawn and quartered with a spork. Every time I play TW2 I can't refuse the urge to kill the s*** out of Letho in the epilogue.

Which is why there's been development of canister rounds and the gradual replacement of current stocks of the M-830 HEAT rounds with the M-830A1 MPAT, which has a proximity fuse giving it an airburst capability (which can also be used against helicopters in a pinch). My US Army tanker contact has relayed to me that there is some reservation in the brass to have the entire prospective M1A3 fleet use a license-built version of the German Rheinmetall L/55 (the Abrams currently uses a variation of the Rheinmetall L/44 that is equipped ba all Leopard 2s up to the -A5 model), as a longer gun means it will be harder to manuever in tight streets. Nils "Ssnake" Hinrichsen of the Steel Beasts team had this to say about the tanks becoming obsolete, though as a former tanker for the Bundeswehr and treadhead, his viewpoint might be a bit biased: Also for those interested, the second FREMM frigate for the French Navy has been commissioned. The name: "Normandie". A video of its shakedown cruise:

The Soviet concept of the tank was closer to assault gun than tank destroyer as other armies (i.e. those who would be on the other side of Soviet tanks) considered them. This is reflected by the fact that Soviet tanks in the Cold War-era carried an even proportion of anti-personnel, HEAT, and kinetic-energy penetrator rounds where their counterparts in the same period who were guarding the North German Plain, the Fulda Gap, and the Danube Line generally carried 2/3 sabot and 1/3 HEAT or multi-purpose warheads.

My dad, an Angeleno through and through and hater of all things New York (his experience with the city was not totally unlike Homer Simpson's), could not contain his giddyness.

Though China and Russia can form tactical alliances as counter-balances to the US in East Asia, they are regional adversaries in regards to Central Asia. I'd go as far as to say Russia's re-armament programs are as much about China as they are about NATO. Also if a deal with Iran is reached and sanctions lifted and if the US opts to release their own oil and gas production for export, energy may well become a buyer's market and Putin's energy strategy undone. These eventualities are not necessarily very likely, but that doesn't change the fact that it's within Obama's capabilities and Russia has the most to lose if Putin pushes his luck.

The one I had an issue with turned out to be one of those "D'oh, are you kidding me?" ones after I finally broke down and looked up a youtube video of it online. It was one of the ctOS breaches in Brandon Docks, where to access the one that was giving me trouble, you had to go to a lift that was sitting by itself diagonally from the building where the machine was you had to hack, climb into the lift and let it take you to the very top, so you could access a camera up on a roof that you couldn't access from the ground, then use that camera to hack the device. The other three devices for that breach were pretty easy. After finally completing that one, I finished off all 16 ctos breaches. Now I'm onto the convoys and fixer contracts. I loath the fixer contracts that require you to shake pursuers, largely because it seems even when you get away from one set, they start searching for you again while you're making your way to the designated "finish" point, and have to do it all over again. I also loathe how unerringly dogged and prescient those ctos scans are, as well as police's nitrous-boosted SUVs that are somehow able to keep up with me on a crotch-rocket. Being able to outrun anything on the streets should be well worth the risk of a wrong move causing Aiden being propelled 120 meters headlong over the handlebars into the pavement/traffic light pole/back of a truck/etc.

I switched between the two camera views plenty. For purposes of navigation I found the "Quarterback" view superior, but for placing large AOE spells I had to use the "top-down" view.

Aside from the "Combat Jack," my favourite bit was them spontaneously yelling at the top of their lungs.

R6 was released a year before CS, but it was'nt a fastpaced multiplayer gunning game. It was slow and methodical and had a well developed single player campaign. The similarities lie in counter terrorism and that they involve guns, and that's it. And a female Swedish Electronics expert. ...of which unfortunately her only usefulness was in two of the most infuriating missions in the whole game Do kind of miss the intrigue of the older Rainbow Six games. Before you were re-taking oil rigs from eco-terrorists, securing nuclear materials stolen by the Mafiya, and foiling a bank-heist by far-right paramilitaries. By the way, I would recommend Raven Shield 2.0 for those feeling nostalgic for the franchise. Among the best additions of this mod was improved teammate AI and trigger discipline, which means your AI teammates aren't as likely to put the kaibosh on your most well-plotted plans.

As whenever I play party-based cRPGs my first toon is almost always a mage, the lack of the zoom out camera was among the very first things I noticed.

I think you can already see small chunks of it in one of the demos, probably IGN's in fact. Very little, but it looks like it's running on a xbone. For it the be available on the XBone and not on the PC which lends itself far better to "strategic view" battle management would seem real backasswards to me.

Though this was informed from the last time Bioware had an in-depth demo of Inquisition, I was massively disappointed when they took the Mass Effect direction of making magic powers only affect enemies once a "shield" layer was stripped from them. Sure magic may have been a game-breaker in previous iterations, but it strikes me as an incredibly lazy way of re-balancing it.

Well who would have guessed that would be a possible party member in Dragon Age: Origins? Dare to dream, my friend.

Snazzy (if somewhat simplified) CGI demo of LockMart's Missile and Fire Control Systems: Though the change in music was... abrupt.

A feat accomplished by an acquaintance of mine on the Task Force 1776 Domination server for ArmA 2: http://youtu.be/MO-wHkLLN0Q?t=2m26s

Unless you are so morally opposed to such a thing as using game guides, I believe on the Mass Effect wiki there was a (frighteningly) exhaustive guide to getting specific combinations of people killed on ME2.

I wouldn't necessarily say Google and Apple bat a thousand with their products, but there's no denying how powerful their marketing approach is.