Rosbjerg

Funny how the most funny stories usually revolve around the horrible death of a party member.. I'm gonna tell another story about my unlucky elevn archer. Who, at this point, had outlived about 10 adventures and had become increasinly gloom about it. The leauge was still up and running, despite the previous failures and deaths of the legendary members. So Aram (my characters name) and the unnamed leader, decided to recruit the next (lower) tier of heroes, to fill the ranks. By now Amras was feeling somewhat guilty for having survived so many friends. Anywho - he gathers 4 followers. 2 young wizards (one of them kind of a half devil, because of an unwilling stay in the nine hells) a tortur master and a famous swashbuckler. The team sets out on a mission, which I can't remember.. along the road arguments run high - the

cheers to you dad! Even if it's a few months late on my side of the world.

most fun is to fly down on a world which have reached the Civilization Stage, but not space - and mess with them in your space ship.. like terraforming their planet (some awesome looking effects - although they don't destroy cities), abducting their citizens, painting their world and making crop circles.

It's a single player experience.. but other players creatures and creations are imported into your game via the Sporemedia, which downloads content from a massive server onto your computer (probably a series of servers, but you get the point). So you might be hunting another players herbivore in your game - and being squashed later by another player created civilization. The AI will run it though. So it is "the former". The universe you enter in the Space stage of the game is truely massive and you'll encounter hundreds of worlds filled with different creatures - created by other players and/or Maxis.

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Mist, anyone?

I always take my first playthrough in Medium/Medium to get a feel .. from there I can usually figure out how to proceed. Most mods crank up the difficulty and complexity enough for me to have the most fun in Hard though. I haven't met an exception for that yet. That being said, you can probably beat Europa Barborum in VH/VH, since the core problem of the Total War series is yet to be completly solved in a mod. Stupid AI.

wow, that's complete nonsense. our economy actually tends to benefit when one of two things (or both) happen: 1) taxes are cut and 2) there's a party split between congress and the white house. in the former, people simply spend more, which also coincidentally increases revenues (happened after both reagan and bush cuts, i can't understand why everyone refuses to acknowledge the facts!). the latter simply means the government doesn't spend us into oblivion. clinton had a split, bush did not for the first 6. that's the last 15 years. to make such a broad statement as you have, without delving deeper is truly superficial and silly biased. again i note, people seem to only read deep enough to find the facts that support their pre-conceived notions, then all else is ignored. taks I did say it was silly and biased.. It was based on the fact that Clinton had to recover the economy after G. H. W. Bush and now, if Obama is elected, he'll have to recover it from G. W. Bush. Of course I recognize that Republicans can run the economy. It just seems to me that Republicans are better at rallying the public and getting the big things done and Democrats are better at keeping the house tidy. Both things are needed in a moderen household, which is why it seems like a good 2 party system. If the two can keep each other in check. Kinda like marriage, if one is too much in charge and the other can't get a say in - nothing useful gets done and spendings go through the roof.

Is the player that dense or is he just playing a character that's dense on purpose? I kinda know the answer with "I didn't know that! I wouldn't have done it if I had known that!", but I just can't imagine someone being that naive. -- We once played a campaign where I screwed up the campaign totally. It was in Call of Cathulu. In that game, if you throw a grenade, you have to roll to see if you can actually throw it in the right direction. If I remember correct there's even a graph to show which direction it goes depending on succes or failure. Long story short - Me and a party of soldiers, in a WW2 setting, were defending a town against Nazis. The campaign was 40 minutes in and we decided to haul everyone in the church to protect them. I decided to throw a grenade at the Germans.. Failed horribly and by evil bad luck chucked the thing inside the church and killed almost all the civilians.. The Germans were so suprised that they stopped their attack, as the Allies tried to kill the fire and save the remaining few. My character decided to flee the scene and that was the end of the campaign as the most important NPC had died.

From my extremely superficial and silly biased look at the situation in America in the last 15 years - it seems to me that the republicans hurt the economy and then the democrats come in and fix things, do something extremely stupid to loose the white house and the republicans come back to ruin the economy again. In that light don't you guys need Obama to come in, fix the economy? Then you can kick him out so a new republican can come in and ruin it all over again.

I spent my entire day yesterday (I was sick) playing Spore.. -Gameplay Spoilers- And within 8-10 hours I was in space. The stages were somewhat boring at first, but after playing I started liking the style of the game.. It tries to be funny, in a "heh-heh" kinda way. When you get out of the water you have to design your creature, with legs arms or whatever you feel you need. Depending on how well you did in the water you'll have more options open for you - more parts and more DNA (each piece costs an amount depending on how advanced it is). In the land face you need to decide wether you want to kill/hunt animals (destroying them completly), socialize with them (become allies) or a combination - like killing X species and allying with Y species. You're brain grows whenever you kill or ally with a certain amount (can't remember), but when your brain has gown to the right size, you move on to the tribal stage. You get DNA and parts whenever you kill or befriend creatures and DNA for eating and following objectives. You'll find skeletal scattered all over the world, each of which will give you a new part. If you want to edit your creature you need to mate with another one of your species. The only thing I found a little wierd here, is that each creature has a little nest area where they hang out - and that's it - you don't see the various creature roam around. Except for some truely epic ones - if you see them you need to get out of the way! trust me.. I had a fun experience - I don't know if it's scriptet, but I was hunting a pack of creatures with some of my bloodthirsty bretheren, when suddenly a space ship flew in and abducted one of our prey. It flew around for 10 minutes or so and then suddenly crashed. The wreck is still there, even in to the space age - and still looks like a "fresh" crash, even though it's over a million years since it's crashed. When you're done with this stage evolution stops and you can't edit your creature again. You can only put clothes on them and customize their superficial apperance afterwards. You now have a small village and then you need to conquer or ally with other tribes or other species - they'll have weapons and building upgrades, so each time you take over a tribe you'll get their tech. You also need to gather food and keep animals and other tribes away from your people and food stocks. When you conquer your continent you move on to the civilization stage. Here you need to design a vehicle, townhall, house, factory and entertainment building. Also a ship, if you have a city near water. This age is like the early 20th century. You design buildings like creatures, except you get alot of predefined blocks that you can then manipulate with and add more on to. It's ok fun, but it's still very cartoony like every thing else in the game. If you appriciate that by now (I did), then you'll probably like the game all in all. Otherwise the design will probably tire you eventually. you then need to harvest Spice (a tribute to Dune I imagine) which will be your income. After conquering, religiously converting or trading/making diplomatic alliences, you get to have airplanes. After that you either need to conquer, convert or ally yourself with the entire planet. I went with warfare through the entire game and that was quite fun. If you have enough money you can fire nukes and/or missles and devastate other nations - everyone will hate you for it though. When you conquer everything, one way or the other, you go to space. Where you need to colonize other planets - abduct and analyze alien life and contact advanced alien nations. Here the same patters emerges - kill, ally or convert. But I haven't gotten that far yet. All in all I thought it was fun - the humor is typical Sim'ish like when you're designing your spacecraft and it says "the only thing between you and space in 2 meters of solid style". -Spoiler end- I'll give it a 7/10 so far.

A friend of mine bought and played the game today and gave the same verdict. He told me it was shallow, felt childish and lacked charm. I tried playing the first few phases of the game - in the water.. which was fun, but really simple, it didn't seem that interesting as a creature on land.

heh.. I guess he learned his lesson? I have a few good of stories, most of them about a particular player who always chooses the weirdest characters.. The stories of these characters are however worse than M-rated. So I'll have to choose a less disturbing one. It's still a bit disturbing, but bear with me. We were playing a "league of extraordinary gentlemen"-ish campaign. We were recruited by the most famous adventurer of the known world, to fight super baddies and that kinda jazz. Well, we were sent on a mission which meant we had to search a forest area for an ancient observatory - in this forest lived a village/big camp of robbers (the good kind) whose help we needed. So we went to visit them and asked for their assistance. They refused. Seeing as we were some of the most famous people in the world we were mildly surprised and insulted. We then went a little overboard and started threatening them, which resulted in a fight - which resulted in a massacre (they started it!). Seeing as we were mostly good guys we didn't really feel all that good about slaughtering an entire village (only men), but as we were wondering what actually happened, a huge war party of orcs attacked. We took care of them as well and subsequently hid the human corpses in a barn. As we finished, a Royal Legion passed by - they didn't know it was a robber

True.. until 1+ years into your relationship, when their radar for these things gets overloaded once a week. Like when suddenly you've clearly done something wrong, by the way you are reading that newspaper.. I don't know how it works with most men, but I do know my fiance will tell me nothing is wrong, when it's obvious he just doesn't want to talk about it. BUT, the, "something is really bothering me and I'm trying desperately to ignore it and let it go" vibe is rolling off him so strongly that I cannot relax at all. So I keep bugging him about it and he keeps saying, "nothing!" Which drives me nuts, because it *is* something... eventually he usually gives in and talks about it... Of course, he's someone who really likes to avoid confrontation which while makes for a peaceful relationship on the surface, can lead to other problems in the long run. Oh I hate that.. I made a point out early on, of making my gf understand, that if I ever insited that it was 'nothing' more than 3 times, she should most definitely leave it alone.. because to me it's nothing short of absolute lack of respect to insist that people share things they don't want to share.

please do!

hmm.. I hadn't thought about that.. But with that in mind alot of reactions, I couldn't understand before, suddenly makes sense.

I think most guys a have experienced their girlfriends going awol on them over nothing.. of course the girls would argue that it was most definitely not nothing.. Have any of you ever tried buying flowers for no apperant reason, only to get the respons "what did you do wrong? " ? .. Only to find that doing the exact same thing 3 months later gives a totally different result like "oooh, you're always so sweet! "..

True.. until 1+ years into your relationship, when their radar for these things gets overloaded once a week. Like when suddenly you've clearly done something wrong, by the way you are reading that newspaper..

Been sick for 2 days - went to the doctor - who then send me to a "tropical doctor", because of my recent trip to India (I got a wierd mental image of visiting a Shaman in Downtown Copenhagen). So now I can't work this week, because I need to get a bunch of tests done and what-not. I hate potentially exotic diseases. I don't have any serious symptoms and the doctor told me it was probably just a bad flu - he just wanted to be on the safe side. So no need to worry (if you are inclined to worry about random people you only know through the internet).

I can't wait for Total War Empires to be released .. After seeing the new video about

heh.. we're so nice in Denmark..

It's not so strange, he expected you to respond in a certain way - and you didn't, hence his reaction. Like if you were to ask a waiter what he would recommend and his respons is akin to yours - I'm sure most people would feel suprised and some offended. Because they expect him to be professional, not like a friend who wants you to make up your own mind.

Oh I know the type - I met a girl like that about 6 years ago - and she, like your ex, had just come out of relationship. It's the "in love with being in love" girl. It's just as common as the "I can't commit right now - but I really like hanging out with you" guy. Both suffer from the same fundenmental problem - They are not willing to comprise their given take on love (I'm looking for someone who can handle ALL of me - I just haven't met the right boy/girl yet etc.) because when you get down to it, they are control freaks. If they aren't able to "handle" the situation excatly like they want, they'll feel really vunerable and uncomfortable. You can compare it to comfort-junkies. Place them in a situation they have no control over and they'll freak out. But even more so, it's like bad junkies - who ends up getting addicted to being addicted, they fix ceases to be what they are chasing, it's far beyond that - instead they become addicted to the rush associated with getting the rush. And then the bad cycle hits in. They can't cure they're need for drugs, because that's no longer their only addiction. Just like the "in love with being in love" girl and "I can't commit right now" guy, are more concerned with the whole situation than the actual person they are getting their love-fix from.

I've noticed that a substantial amount of people here have been playing the Total War Games. So I decided to make a thread where we can share some Mod finds, advice, tactics and experiences. In case you haven't found it yet - TWCenter is the place to go for Mods. Rome: Troy Total War doesn't need explaining, you get to play out the old saga yourself. Ancient Empires is still under development. Remodelling of almost every unit in the Vanilla game and adding alot of content. Fall of the Republic - Rise of the Empire - I haven't played this yet, but I heard it's amazing - anyone played it? Medieval Total War II (+ Kingdoms) Broken Crescent (MTW2) - My favorite faction in the vanilla campaign is Egypt, here I get to expand into the middle east instead. I've yet to try it, but it looks really promising! Kingdoms Grand Campaign Mod (Kingdoms) - I love this mod, I played Retrofit alot, because I wanted the new features of Kingdoms in the original MTW2, this also adds the factions, the units, a huge map, permanent forts and units are now a little more expensive to train and maintain. - I'll add some more tomorrow - feel free to post your own finds!

I have to say that even though I don't personally like WoW, with over 10 million subscribers - it's a HUGE succes. Blizzard definitely did it, we can't argue that.