Hurlshort

Played Space Rangers 2 for a bit, what a treat. I think I'll get my $7 worth on this one. I also played Dracula a bit, nice adventure game.

No one cares.

I re-played King's Quest 5 about a year ago and was surprised how well it has held up. The hand drawn backgrounds have aged great.

I thought the second one was pretty entertaining. It is a bit goofy, but the characters are good. The third one started off well but then turned lousy. Although I will watch Milla Jovavich in anything, so none of them is unwatchable.

Youth in Revolt - Fantastic movie, funny and witty throughout. Michael Cera really is an oddly fantastic lead actor.

Is there a big PC maker that doesn't pedal their computers with a ton of junk on it? Gateway, HP and Dell all do. Of course that is the price you pay for getting a great deal on them, I picked up two PC's the other day for my in-laws business and it was less than $500 total for two solid rigs.

That seemed to be US's MO throughout the tourney, strong second half but weak at the start. Ah well, I'm not too disappointed, this group will be around for at least another tourney, and might even be a bit better.

Landon Donovan just continues to get it done.

Well, the King's quest series is basically the Patriarch of the adventure game genre, and really the earliest blockbuster IP in the industry. It was the Super Mario of PC gaming, really. It was based loosely on a myriad of fairy tales and revolved around a royal family. While it was not overly adult in content, it was a fairly difficult series. If you failed to do something early on, it might come back and kill you in the late stages. TSL is a small development group that has redone the graphics of a few of the classic adventure titles to make them more modern. I believe they were making a new King's Quest, when they received a cease and desist letter from the owners of the IP. I guess something changed.

I'm a little shocked at some of the crowds I've seen Bill Clinton in. I haven't even seen any sign of his security.

The glory of beating a tough boss is lessened when my wife and kids just roll their eyes at all my awesome exploits.

I'm pretty sure you can avoid sleeping with anyone in the Witcher. Geralt can't help it if all the ladies want a piece of his scarred and pasty behind.

Tax breaks are a pretty standard procedure when an area is trying to attract new growth industries.

Alienware was bought by Dell, I'd stay away from them. Dell owns Alienware, but it still operates as a specialized gaming boutique. It is similar to the developer-publisher relationship, Alienware gets more exposure and resources, Dell gets to sell high end products under a more reputable name. They've been together for like 5 years now. I bought my desktop form them about three years ago and it has been a fantastic machine. It didn't have any junk installed on it, at least nothing noticeable.

I play everything on easy. Takes away the frustration aspect and, wouldn't you know it, the games are still enjoyable.

I finished up Alpha Protocol. What a delight, I'm still questioning some of my decisions, but at the end of the game I felt pretty comfortable with the path I took. Now I'll probably spend some time with LotR Online and maybe back to Red Dead Redemption. I also bought Fear the other day and plan on giving that a bit of time.

They were probably expecting Assassin's Creed numbers for Mirror's Edge. They spent a lot of money on it. I think AP will not get a sequel because it does not seem like Obsidian and Sega have a great relationship at this point. I would be surprised to see them work together again. Thankfully Obsidian is already moving forward and working with other publishers, but I doubt Square Enix wants to do AP2.

Actually I was originally calling it futbol, but Monte (who is English) was addressing the sport in the US and called it soccer, and I felt for the sake of continuity it was best to refer to it as soccer. It's a pretty silly thing to get upset about. Everyone knows that it is the same sport no matter what you call it.

I want to bump the thread and give a short update. I am down to my last few student drawn comics, so I've been brainstorming on how to make my own comics without them looking like utter garbage. I decided to go with bitmap comics using Grafx2. Feel free to stop by in a week or so and see my first strips. Here is my first shot at it: http://www.waltersland.net

I wonder what number they need to hit to be considered a success? I would think around 300k or so would be a good number, but I could be way off.

I don't know as much about this stuff as you guys, but I do watch a lot of Law & Order. If you want to work Major Case, you need to develop a personality tick of some sort.

We like soccer, as an international competition at least. The World Cup matches have had good ratings considering the time of day they are on. What we really don't go for is professional league soccer like the MLS or any of it's predecessors. When team USA is playing though, it does get attention. If we get into the final round or even (gasp) the championsip match it will get ratings that will make any Super Bowl proud. BTW, only around 65% of Major League Baseball players are from the USA. We get a lot of players from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Australia, South Africa, Puerto Rico, The Dominican Republic, Venezuela, etc. The US also has a gigantic youth soccer movement. The problem is when they get into their young teens, the best athletes gravitate towards the sports that pay big. But Landon Donovan is a pretty top-rate player, so maybe you will see a few more youths sticking to soccer to be like him. Donovan is the first noticeable US soccer player I've seen in my lifetime.

Hey look at that, Donovan came through in the 91st minute. So looks like US and England advance. I don't follow much futbol, but is it common to disallow goals?

I'm not one to throw down the ref victimization card, but the US has had two goals disallowed for phantom offside calls. How hard is it to video review just the goals? It's not like there are that many.

I'm not entirely sure how the business model works here, but the CD-keys are likely a matter of bookkeeping, and that is very important. Steam sells products for other publishers. They need to be able to keep track of all that meticulously, or else the publisher will not do business with them. The CD-Keys are likely the easiest way to do this. EA gives a bunch of CD-Keys to Steam. They track the keys, and when they are activated, they send Steam a bill. Again, I'm speculating here, but I imagine it works something like that.