Humodour

Juno. I liked it?

If America is so concerned about terrorists and cults, why hasn't somebody done something about Scientology yet?

Agreed. The same is true of Torment, which was quite successful in the eyes of IPLY/BIS, especially over time. And yes, I would consider BG1 to be a 'critical' success. Certainly not BG2, though. It was more of the same with quite a bit of movement backwards in some areas. Fun, sure. Financially successful? Sure, like NWN1 OC. I haven't played MoTB or NWN2 so I can't comment on those, but KOTOR2 certainly had more depth and complexity to it than KOTOR1. Which one did I enjoy more? KOTOR1, probably because KOTOR2 was unfinished in my eyes - it had great potential. But perhaps also because I just loved KOTOR1, though it has an unfortunate lack of replay value (as with KOTOR2 IMHO). NWN1 OC, Volo? I thought we'd already agreed that a bigger bunch of rubbish for an OC was never seen? How you can call it intellectual or complex with a straight face is anyone's guess; it was one of the most ludicrous and forced campaigns I've played in a CRPG - the only thing which saved it in my eyes was exploration of a lost ancient civilisation. If you'd speak of SoU or HotU it'd be a different matter. Whose games do I enjoy more - Bioware's or BIS/Obsidian's? It depends on what mood I am in, though BIS/Obsidian has made more games that interest me. To Morgoth: I can't understand you. You often use double negatives and contradict previous sentences. Coupled with your intentional use of sarcasm, it becomes near impossible to distinguish what your actual stance on something really is.

Hahaha. So he hated Australia too? Do our 200,000 or so Jews run the country, perhaps?

I liked Star Wars (of old) more than just for "intellectual garbage".

Morpheus, is that you? Dammit, Everett needs to put tighter security on you. Disconnect your from all network access. Yeah. But attempts to introduce learning to games sound very interesting.

That makes no sense at all. What on earth are you trying to say here? I guess it was sarcasm. It doesn't translate very well through the internet. I was picking up on the fact that both of you were talking about what games reinvented/revitalised CRPGs, yet you both neglected to mention Fallout 1 and 2. No biggie. :S

If you're of the opinion that T.rex wasn't feathered, even though its ancestors and relatives were, that's totally cool with me.

Yeah and birds have scales on their feet, while feathers themselves are modified scales. On all specimens of clade coelurosaurian, at least one fossil specimen of each species has been found with feathers. There is only one excepytion to this rule: ornithomimosaurians, and all evidence indicates that's only because we haven't found any fossils which preserved the feathers Do fossils without feathers indicate lack of feathers? Certainly not, considering the immense chance occurrence of the fossil occurring in the first place, let alone fossilising somethinh as soft as a feather. That's like saying fossils without skin indicate lack of skin. screw science when drunk arg. EDIT: oh an p.s.: we've found fossils of t.rex with feathers. some stupid link: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...thery_dino.html

where is political forum? petition.

but they were wrong because trex and raptros didn't hsave feathers

BG along with Diablo revived a die'in genre, there hadn't been a noteable release of an CRPG for years until that point, well some people may say M&M was, but meh, it didn't reinvent the genre. CRPG's were well established before this dying off period (see Ultima's, bards tales etc...) but between around 93-97 it was a bleak peroid, where RPG's almost died completely at one point, and what was released was generally extremely poor, BG and Diablo breathed a breath of fresh air into the genre and pushed the bounderies of what found be expected. But it didn't really estalbish the genre, just gave it a jolt. It's like saying WoW was the first established MMO... Everquest and Ultima Online would be better responses and more accurate, WoW is certainly the first widely popular MMO, but it didn't establish them. Ok, so Fallout 1 & 2 never existed?

Hmm. Has anybody seen Dave Gaider since?

How long. Oops. A summary: OK, Di, but it's highly unlikely your decreasing your chances of food poisoning anymore than if you used soapy water to clean your cutting board. Also, some studies indicating no relationship between decreased risk of disease and infection, and use of antibacterial cleaners. Not really. Instead of getting caught up in semantics I'll just leave this one to wikipedia: "The term originally referred to any agent with biological activity against living organisms; however, "antibiotic" now is used to refer to substances with anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, or anti-parasitical activity.". There's more definition fapping here if it matters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiseptic Point is it produces resistance, whatever you call it. One of the few exceptions to this is alcohol-based cleaners... which most unfortunately aren't, due to the inappropriateness of using alcohol in most contexts. Even then, alcohol-resistant strains do evolve. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibacterial_soap On Salmonella: Some of the best ways to prevent Salmonella are washing your hands before and after dealing with meat, keeping cold food cold and hot food hot, and not letting foods touch utensils that have been contaminated by raw meat. The utensils themselves are unimportant - cleaning them as normal with basic detergent is perfectly sufficient for removal of Salmonella. Detergent is often the most effective way to remove bacteria because the molecules used actually attach themselves to bacteria and wash them away (due to polarity). If you insist on using antibacterial cleaner to clean just your cutting board, that's fine. I'm targeting the people who deliberately buy antibacterial household cleaners thinking they are doing themselves any good. But do note that all authoritative sources on Salmonella prevention suggest washing contaminated utensils with hot soapy water, without any recourse to antibacterial cleaners. Personally, I reckon you're falling for yet another hygiene marketing trick. http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/health_advice/f.../salmonella.htm Salmonella isn't an especially deadly bacteria, either. Most cases of Salmonella poisoning resolve themselves without medical intervention (often unbeknown to the victim). And no, we won't see the resistance immediately (multi-resistance that is - pretty much every bacteria now is resistant to at least one thing we use). But future generations will soon, so let's not resort to the "it doesn't effect me" argument - especially since it may well yet, especially as you grow older and have a less capable immune system. A succinct presentation of my point is here: Here is a nice study on the usefulness of antibacterial household cleaners, for further reading: http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/140/5/321

Jesus Christ. I know that's a recurring theme in fantasy. But couldn't they try to only use it incidentally? Explicitly going for that... oh dear. Dragon Age is for hippies. Confirmed. Bioware does one thing well: well, what they do well. Bioware doesn't purport to be a maker of new or innovative games (though I'm sure their marketting department does). They know what they do well, and it sells and makes people happy. I can understand why they'd not change that. Love and friendships despite the odds was an important theme in Baldur's Gate. Considering this is a spiritual successor to BG, it makes sense to include this and hype it up. I doubt the dichotomy will change any time soon: Bioware and Obsidian/BIS = good and complementary games. Bioware churns out the fluff RPGs to sustain us, Obsid/BIS makes the brain food that makes it all worth it.

Congratulations. You just won some medals. One for tardiness, one for thread necrophilia, and one for obscure but cool Latin. Please, stay.

Also of interest is bird intelligence. As you may know, human intelligence capabilities (creativity, emotion, language, etc) are something unique to mammals. They've been exhibited in many species - dolphins, chimpanzees, meerkats (a very interesting and intelligent species - altruism through sentry duty and giving their life to save their children, creativity, lateral thinking - reaching a fruit by working together and getting on another meerkat's shoulders, jealousy, love, desire, self-image, and a differentiating language - e.g. instead of one call for danger they might say "danger snake" or "danger bird"), but all these species have been mammals. This is because mammals have a neocortex - a part of the brain which is very new (well 200 million years old - it evolved when the dinosaurs evolved) and evolved at the very end of the evolution from reptiles to mammals. Birds obviously don't have a neocortex, since they are dinosaurs. They have a reptilian cortex like mammals and reptiles, but is that all? No. Unlike reptiles and mammals, birds have since evolved their own "new cortex". This is likely due to becoming warm-blooded, and forming societies (e.g. flocks). Interestingly, although this neocortex isn't the same as that found in mammals, it is very similar to parts of it and performs some of the same functions. A very beautiful example of convergent evolution. Now, what does this mean? Are birds smart or dumb? The answer is smart. Smarter than some mammals, smarter than all reptiles and lower (fish, amphibians, insects). And some specific birds like parrots are in fact not just capable of immitation, but also intelligence. See the parrot Alex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_%28parro...Accomplishments And also a list of intelligence features of birds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_intellig...ocial_behaviour Also, this isn't entirely true: Because as previously stated, meerkats are also capable of this.

Uh, well it was me who brought up evolution/creationism actually. Visc: Yeah I agree. I think that looking at plant evolution is the best way to understand evolution on a macroscopic scale, since it's the most well-documented and has the most dots connected up. Here's an interesting tidbit: Birds are the only surviving dinosaurs. Odd isn't it? You'd think that more than one species of the thousands of dinosaur species would have survived to this day... then again a lot of what people consider dinosaurs weren't dinosaurs. E.g.: pterosaurs (flying reptiles) weren't dinosaurs, but were very closely related. Crocodiles weren't dinosaurs, but lived at the same time and were very closely related. Turtles weren't dinosaurs, they lived at the same time, but are as related to Humans as they were to dinosaurs. For example, here is one of the closest ancestors of mammals: The Dimetrodon. We didn't actually evolve from that, but it was the closest relative of the "reptile" we DID evolve from. Which is funny because most people think the Dimetrodon is a dinosaur, let alone a mammal-like reptile. And, not that it's probably a shock, velociraptors are very close cousins to birds, which are both living members of the dinosaur group maniraptor. Which isn't that hard to believe if you examine illustrations of the velociraptor: Further, T. Rex had feathers and was also a close relative of birds. These birds here seem to be the closest to the other raptors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratite#Galler..._Living_Species A not to scale comparison of velociraptor feet with pigeon feet: Oviraptors (mistakenly called egg snatchers) didn't actually steal and eat the eggs from other dinosaurs, but sat on their own nests to keep them warm - like birds do, and like other dinosaurs didn't. You sort of realise that your old conception of reptiles being hard, stiff, big, slow and scaley isn't exactly correct considering they gave rise to birds and mammals and indeed many of them resembled/were birds and mammals.

Baah. Baaaaah.

I'm not sure what your stance on creationism/evolution is, but yeah, unicellular organisms: fungi, bacteria, archaea, viruses, etc tend to evolve very rapidly. Their evolution is both assured and documented, as it occurs in real-time. IIRC, viruses are the fastest - evolving something like 10^6 (one million) times faster than eukaryotic genomes (what fungi, animals and plants have). This is why we get the flu (influenza virus) each year - it is always evolving so our immune systems never fully recognise it when it comes back. Here is a nice paper on it: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlere...cgi?artid=55305

SCi owns Eidos? What will happen to Eidos?

This him? Yeah, that's not really you... anymore. But hah - it was a good impersonation at the time, no? Maybe you'll get a name change soon?

No more name changes for this rabbit. None whatsoever. REALLY! I gotta say, Visceris was way cooler.

Maybe I just like arguing. It seems more like you have a bad argument.

Really? I've never heard anybody say so, and nobody has been interested enough in System Shock 2 to try it with me. Hmm, I'll try and get my friend to do it with me. Could be fun.