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People have been finding out specific details of future DLC from data present in the game since Kasumi. Apparently they don't care. Is this their way of throwing us a bone?

Maybe yourself or someone else with knowledge of the specifics of German copyright law and TOS of the demo itself can explain how exactly this constitutes "piracy". Don't take it personally, but if you don't have time to lay it out for us, I don't have time to give a flying ****. But dude, this is the new sh!t.

I'd buy a console to play that.

^I think all the WC games had that branching campaign structure depending on player results, except for Privateer and maybe Prophecy. WC1 had some pretty sweet writing too - the feeling of grief and general morale breakdown as Confed lost ground, as conveyed in conversations with wingmates and the Col. was a very nice touch. Plot interactivity, in a game that's two decades old. Yep, I think I can see the developmental regression alright.

You *need* to use Singularity. Even if it doesn't work as advertised on protected mobs, it will cause progressive damage and inflict a stagger on enemies in close proximity, which you should exploit to take out their shields. Once they are floating around helpless, have Miranda Warp bomb them for MASSIVE DAMAGE. The Adept is the only class that can set up its own Warp detonations, so be creative. And don't forget your melee attack either, it hurts pretty hard, staggers mobs and if you time it correctly it can cut in half your reload time. I don't recommend Hardcore for a first playthrough, though. Learn the game, the different powers/weapons and your squadmates, and if you feel like replaying you'll have a much better chance of enjoying the harder modes without reloading n times for every fight.

Does not compute. All previous attempts to create such a thing have failed, the more catastrophically the bigger the government - the chief product of such things being usually megadeaths. I'm opposed on principle to what is, basically, a grand social engineering project engendered by wishful thinking. The same kind of wishful thinking that disregards real problems that current social science hasn't found a solution to, like the potential for free riders to destroy the viability of many of those proposed systems. Of course, megadeaths may very well be the inevitable result of and solution to the sustainability problem of limited resources vs unlimited population expansion. But somehow, I doubt this is the advertised outcome. edit: do I suck? or do I suck?!

Bloodlines endings were awesome. I swear my jaw dropped after getting the Prince ending. And the only "good" ending in Stalker was the secret one. Good stuff.

My bad. I confused Veteran with Normal. I meant to say that the game is supposedly balanced around the level of difficulty where regular mooks don't have shields/barriers. That would be Normal, I think. And yeah, I don't think *anyone* liked the heavy-handed approach they took wrt biotics and protections, to me it's just lazy design. Among the many changes I've tried is removing the "shields block powers" rule and the game feels genuinely more fun to play as an Adept. Enemies still have a ton of health and hit pretty hard, but stuff like Pull Field is crazy OP, and YMIR/Prime minibosses become a joke. That said, (spoilers) . The required level of practice -and reading- for pulling that off is probably beyond what the vast majority of players are willing to invest into a single-player shooter. That's an entirely different discussion, so let's not go there...

There are no "speed bursts" per se, the closest to that are some class-specific abilities (Infiltrator, Soldier, Vanguard) which slow time down for short periods in certain circumstances. Grenades and shield/barrier buffs are special (companion) powers you get to select later on. Cloak is the Infiltrator's trademark move, so for variety's sake, you won't get it unless you mod the game or replay as one. I would suggest you focus on maxing out your class passive skill (the "Adept" tree) first, and then branch out. The cooldown reduction from that and upgrades makes quite a difference. Combining powers is something you need to figure on your own. Most combinations involve using your companions' powers (which you can drag into your shortcuts so you don't have to pause the game each time you want to use them), especially if you are an Adept. Heavy Singularity + Miranda's Unstable Warp is the Adept's bread and butter, for example. However, you don't really *need* to use spell combos unless you are playing on Hardcore at least, as spamming Throw/Pull works just fine against unprotected mobs - the cooldown is short enough that you can keep them down almost permanently, and ragdolled targets take extra damage. The game is supposedly balanced around Veteran difficulty, but it's only in the higher difficulties that there's some room for tactics and the combat isn't reduced to spamming shockwave and shooting from behind a crate.

****ing ****, looks terrible! <insert old skool RPG rant and suitable suggestions of plagiarism of DMC and GOW> I'm outta here.

I don't know what you are referring to, but unless he's a wife beater or a sex offender, in my eyes that doesn't hurt his image. So, he's an **** and makes no apologies, Boo ****ing hoo. I'm sick of this goody-goody make nice guilt-flavored syrup being forced down my throat with everything. And regarding his extreme weight changes, I'm betting he's healthier than most people who lead a sedentary life and eat trash. If only because he's got enough money to hire people who know how far he can push himself while doing that.

I'm actually happy that Barcelona got taken down a peg, but this is simply not true. Hello, last defender. There was also a pretty clear handball by Arshavin around 91', handing it over to his goalie. Still, Arsenal played brilliantly, they were able to neutralize Messi without getting any of their defenders sent off (Song was close, though), and their second goal was simply beautiful. Round 2 is shaping to be an awesome game, we'll see if Wenger really has the measure of Barca and can effectively destroy their ball circulation -and by extension their concentration- or this was just a fluke. Also, can we please have the branding trolling/hijacking removed? BOR-ING

He also has the best business cards in the biz, or he'll kill you.

Replace "bums" with "gaming journalists", make it compulsory, and maybe we'll talk.

Win. What's with all the bashing on Bio's dialogue anyway. As has been remarked before, good dialogue isn't about listening to pseudo-intellectual diatribes on the nature of... stuff - dialogue's just a tool to flesh out characters. Sarevok (both BG1 and ToB) is a good example, I think. Garrus is pretty solid as well. Liara... just give me a chance to shoot her -or let her get a collector missile- in the face in the next game, please. Different people at Bio write different parts of the dialogue, so the quality can be uneven. But please, keep the gaming algebra coming. I feel we're getting close to a breakthrough, here.

Or is it pretty princess now? Anyway, I haven't been following DA2 development. Is there going to be actual combat in there somewhere this time around or will I still be able to go make me a sandwich every time there's a fight? If it has a comparable amount of filler combat to DAO, my figure is going to be so ruined! (read: won't bother with it either)

It's funny 'cause it's true.

I'm not sure if this was a direct response to Monte's (tongue-in-cheek I think) remark about the 2nd Amendment but, do you really think that small arms protect you from fascism? Really? Other than that, I agree for the most part. However, the founding fathers didn't imagine a scenario where the people didn't care about, or in fact actually wanted, a fascist US. No, at its core it's something much more perverse. Fascism represents the desire to turn the state into a machine whose essential function is to destroy ideological opposition of any sort, to the state itself. The complete lack of acceptance of the right for different opinions to exist, and the willingness -preference, in fact- to use force to remove ideological opponents is the true mark of a fascist. In this sense, military discipline and cults of personality are useful, but ultimately accessory. With no ideological alternatives available, it's expected that people will simply succumb to groupthink and propaganda and adhere to the political orthodoxy, something that is facilitated by making sure that any relevant historical, cultural and ethnic symbols that people can identify with are hijacked, reinterpreted or rewritten for use by the Party, the Movement or what have you - unless they have been outright erased. Fascism is, in short, absolute intolerance and the annihilation of the individual made political philosophy. Mussolini pretty much sums it up:

On the other hand, MMOs can be awesome if you can find a group of nice/like-minded players to group with regularly. I know I was completely addicted for some time to DDO, and it was only because I happened to come across a bunch of nice guys that recruited me into their guild. Grouping with people with similar interests and preferences is what made the game for me, but the downside is when the group dissolved, going back to PUGs was not an option and I quit. People here have often come together to play different games. They wouldn't have me, but a less abrasive person like yourself would probably have fun. And I'm secretly hoping that a few of the regulars here will at least give TOR a shot, so there's that...

Fair enough. I have to say, I really like that they have given each squadmate a very distinct style. And I also like what they've done overhauling the weapons, with each gun having a unique feel and not necessarily being "worse" than its counterparts (except for the Mattock, I hear that's just crazy-silly OP), but it's a shame that DLC guns are just mailed to you as soon as you install the pack - I'd much rather have them added to stores or optimally, to quests, as in Kasumi. It's a bit schizophrenic, because they obviously put a lot of effort into giving each gun and character style a touch of uniqueness, but then they kinda bungled the way it's actually handled ingame, just throwing it in. I could understand Jack making her daring escape in her default outfit, but there's no reason why she wouldn't wear a hardsuit when the situation warrants it... an issue that could have been rectified with DLC but wasn't. Ideally, let the player choose what squaddies wear. And yeah, I can understand how a lawyer would tear his shirt over the quarian "legal proceedings". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3or9lrQ2_ms ^that's how it should have been handled, imo.

That pretty much applies to all team-based online games, at least in my experience. Back then when I was serious about CS, I stopped playing in open servers altogether... there was no point. Clan vs clan and in-clan training matches being the only way the game plays as it's meant to be played mean that playing with strangers is basically a waste of time at best, and the way to an early grave at worst. That said, it can be pretty amusing to park your jeep in the middle of that runway. That's a Battlefield griefing classic, right there. And, if you do it right, the plane pilot will be punished for teamkilling. Not that I've ever done that myself, no sirree. Ironically, the hassle of finding a decent bunch of players inclined to teamplay is the biggest turnoff for online games for me these days...

Might be my scientific background driving me to be anal here, so bear with me. I'm fine with plot devices trumping science, but they need to be well executed - that is, at least consistent with established canon and the observed in-universe tech. This is a perfect example of the opposite, however. In the collector cruiser, you enter the ship through a hole in the outer hull. If there's indeed a breathable atmosphere within, there's no need for the masks equipped by the crew - if the environment is a partial vacuum, you still need to do something about ebullism (bubbles in the blood); if it's an unbreathable but pressurized atmosphere, how come nobody has trouble breathing aboard the collector base? The trap scenario also suggests that the scene was conceived to convey the idea that the collector vessel was little more than a dead, floating piece of scrap. This is supported by the fact that the collector vessel is stated to have suffered main power failure, with kinetic barriers offline. In the intro cutscene, when the Normandy is torn apart, the good old forcefield sci-fi cliche is used for atmosphere containment, so no kinetic barrier = no atmosphere. And the naked EVA antics in the upper layers of a brown dwarf (and near the accretion disk around a black hole!) are even worse. Brown dwarves radiate more heat than they receive from the star they orbit (temp ~1000 K and upwards) and also emit hefty amounts of ionizing radiation. Personal barriers or ship-mounted shields won't help as you need magnetic fields to deflect that (or a lead shirt). Interestingly, they also equip gasmasks for that scene. If there was an atmosphere, such a thing wouldn't be necessary. I'm not really concentrated on finding faults with the game, it's just that this is a glaring hole brought about exclusively by the removal of ME1-style wardrobes and their substitution with nothing. I guess different people have different thresholds for their suspension of disbelief, but I feel this was a pretty silly mistake to make, and one that could have been solved pretty easily. But then... they failed to solve it through DLC. D:

This is false. Unemployment hits across the board, it doesn't hurt the poor more than the middle class - in fact, it would hurt the middle class more because the middle class is a larger portion of the population. Not really, no. The unemployment rate for young people is among the highest in both Tunisia and Egypt, with figures as high as 40% (IMF data). Yeah, it's not the poor(est) that have been burning police trucks in Egypt, it's a generation that suffers from long-term unemployment and is faced with the prospect of not finding a job in the foreseeable future, given that the economic growth of their country just isn't enough to create enough jobs for all the people joining the labor force. So, yeah, those people don't have much to lose at all, because what we're looking at here is a lost generation. Those aren't my words, by the way. I guess it's also a coincidence that some countries likely to go up in flames (Morocco, Syria, Jordan...) are already moving to tackle precisely the issues of unemployment and food prices. Crushing repression take care of things in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Massive protests also going on in Yemen. The Arab countries have the highest mean unemployment rate in the world. All a coincidence, right? The issue here is that either you have trouble understanding the difference between "if" and "iff", or maybe think that others don't understand this difference and therefore won't spot your attempts at equivocation. You keep rebutting my idea of an iff between bad economic conditions and revolution. The problem is, that's not my opinion at all, rather a misrepresentation you keep repeating. Adverse economic conditions are possibly the single most common element present in revolutions through history, followed closely by war, perhaps. When studying history, there's no such thing as linear causality, but the prevalence and correlation are difficult to dispute. The same is not true for government excesses (if only because favourable economic conditions tend to paint governments in good light), which is the thesis you were putting forth, with Wikileaks as the agent of change. Yeah... because declaring that I'm "losing" clearly makes it so. Quite telling that you describe the debate in terms of victory/defeat, too. Now that I really know what's your motivation here, I have finally lost interest. Congrats.

You're exposed to a vacuum in both the derelict Reaper and the Collector cruiser. And there's at least one assignment that takes place on board a ship that has been venting atmosphere for who knows how long. What's this? @Volo: proof please