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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

So, two deaths in two years that have apparently been downplayed or insufficiently investigated, accusations of abuses sexual and otherwise, a mutiny, and a captain that has been dismissed as a result of the political ****storm the Defence Minister is facing. Nope, it's not the synopsis of Oliver Stone's latest project. Not yet, anyway. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/2...rassment-claims http://www.bild.de/BILD/politik/2011/01/26...r-schikane.html The second link is in German, which I can't read to save my life. But it has some juicy pics of the "rituals" allegedly going on aboard.

Yes... that much is obvious, and I actually acknowledge that if you read my post. What influenced that design decision, however? I don't know, and neither do you. They are however capitalising on the shortcomings of that decision to sell cheap micro DLC.

You think so? So, to do away with the silly traditional inventory, they ended up with a system where newly found weapons magically reproduce and equip themselves to your squad, where "weapons lockers" found around the game are in fact "weapons factories", and in which a rebreather (and nipple suspenders!) protects you from hard vacuum. I think it's pretty inconsistent that "gameplay reasons and balance" are used to justify, for instance, the thermal clip fiasco, but that same excuse is no good to explain why characters can carry ridiculous loads. And I agree, ME1 could have done with about 50% of the variety it had, perhaps less. The differences between models IX and X of a weapon were negligible. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the system. @Volo: cool story bro.

Um, no. I never said that living in squalor was necessary and sufficient for revolution, nor that that risk of revolution is a function of poverty that can be analysed and whose inflection points can be used to make predictions. You either misunderstood or are twisting my original statement by introducing a notion I didn't talk about and then attacking that. Bad form. However, historical evidence does suggest a correlation between poverty -or a steep decline in living standards- and the willingness of people to revolt openly and risk their lives in resistance against the system, while the same isn't true for simple oppression or evidence of wrongdoing by the ruling class; I have provided examples, but if you want more, the military dictatorships of South America also support this. Dismissing a sample as "coddled, smug and self-satisfied" just doesn't cut it - clearly, that is a consequence of several generations living in welfare states where people tend to take everything for granted and the sense of entitlement is second only to the qualities you named. This can only happen if high living standards are maintained consistently for a long time. @Wals: true enough. A sufficiently well organized internal security apparatus can go a long way towards aborting any revolutions.

Ah, of course. So they didn't cut stuff from the game, they "simplified" and "streamlined" it. Haha, whatever. The inventory system worked just fine in ME1. You could change weapons and armor for Shep and the squad on the fly, without needing to find a stupid "weapons locker" that may or may not be available in the vicinity. Now you have a system with a much more limited amount of options because "the game didn't need 20 different shotguns", that results in stupid **** like getting a new weapon in a mission that is automagically equipped to all squadmates that can use it, regardless of whether you want to or not, squadmates getting into firefights in nothing but tattoos and a nipple suspender, and "ammo powers" in place of, you know, actual special abilities. Of course, an actual inventory system completely destroys the viability of micro DLC shenanigans that make give the player a bunch of ridiculously overpowered gear, and "alternate appearances" for squadmates, at the start of the game. ME2 did a lot of things right and I like it much better than 1, but either the people shouting that EAWare killed the old Bio are right, or somebody somewhere thought that they weren't making as much money with NWN as they could with, say, Halo 3. @Thorton_AP: Nope. Not an actual DLC that brings back the old inventory system. Just stuff that somewhat addresses the consequences of designing the game without one.

What hyperbole are you talking about? ME2 shipped without an inventory system, and BIO has been selling DLC to compensate this, somewhat.

The inventory.

Err... you've been doing something about this argument, but I'm not quite sure what. So I just had to go back and read what I originally said: You are pointing out that -despite bad conditions in Egypt and Tunisia- it wasn't the poorest arab countries that have revolted, and that despite obvious corruption, people in Europe are "coddled, smug and self-satisfied" (agree 100% btw). Hmm... isn't that basically a declaration of agreement with what I said?

I guess that paying extra for a staple of the genre that has been included in previous incarnations doesn't mean jack for you. And of course they aren't going to do anything like what I posted. It was a hyperbolic example intended to make a point. They will keep removing stuff from the game and selling it separately as long as people keep buying into that. No more, no less.

So? They could ship a game without SFX or music, with a max resolution of 800x600, multiplayer support but no maps etc... and then sell all of that separately. You wouldn't need any of that to "complete" the game, but they would still be selling you bits and pieces that you would expect to be in the game to begin with. Or, you know, the inventory.

No, I just won't accept any views of somebody who is pointedly anti-islam. Yes, this is called bigotry. No, I'm not talking about Barry Rubin.

(not really)