Enoch

Clearly a nutter. I didn't think there were any real Malthusians left! The building is actually pretty close to my neighborhood. When I play basketball with co-workers, depending on where they drop me off, I sometimes end up waiting right in front of the Discovery HQ for the bus that takes me home.

Don't alignment issues prevent Monks from taking Barbarian levels? (i.e., the former must be Lawful, while the latter cannot.)

I'd suggest at least a little tinkering with the lineup in IWD2-- that solo unarmed portion would be absolute murder on Ironman without a Monk or Druid in the party.

Playing BG2 without a Druid? I guess Watchers' Keep is less mage-battle-intense than basic SOA, but the most essential spell to use against any enemy spellcasters is the Druid-only 5th Level "Insect Plague." AoE disruption of all enemy spellcasting, regardless of most protection spells, magic resistence, or invisibility. (Hint: target your own charging fighters to get past Improved Invisibility problems-- they won't be affected, but every enemy within 15' of them will.) Once they aren't casting anymore, you can just wail on them until the protection spells wear off.

I'm guessing that you've never tried it.

No it's not, it follows from the idea that all men are equal before God. Just like men are endowed with inalienable rights by their Creator, from Declaration of Independence. For many centuries, the Christian message of equality before God was more of a "don't stir the pot and seek redress of wrongs in this world, just trust that God will fix things when we're all dead." A powerful message to help preserve and reinforce heirarchical societal structures-- render unto Caesar and all that. Hurl is right-- it wasn't until the Reformation and the Enlightenment that people started taking up the idea of secular equality in a serious manner. Some took this as an extension of equality before god (e.g., many Congregationalists in New England and Quakers in the middle colonies), but others did so out of a belief that god couldn't be trusted and that if Man wanted justice, he'd have to do it himself (e.g., the French enlightenment philosophers who guys like Jefferson and Madison read and emulated). The people we Americans lump together as "the Founding Fathers" included some from both camps.

That's because he glosses over just how much "creep forward 30 feet to find another dozen of whatever monsters run this particular dungeon" there is on every single map. So, yeah, nice work Tigs!

I am a serial non-finisher of games. To me, the greater cost of a game is the time I sink into it, not the cash I fork out to buy it. So if the game gets to a point where the gameplay isn't fun and there aren't enough other incentives (story, character, stat/loot progression, atmosphere, art/sound/music design, etc.) to keep me interested, the game ceases to be worth my time and I stop playing. To me, it seems wrong to put that extra 5 hours into a game that I'm not enjoying, just so that I can say I've finished it. Suffering through things that aren't fun just to get them over with is work, not recreation. Yeah, and that seems like a more messed up thing than the second-hand market. Maybe publishers should put the screws to Gamestop a bit. It really annoys me that I can go into Gamestop on a day that a game is released, and find zero copies available unless I pre-ordered it. They are a business, they are supposed to keep a stock of in demand items. There is no other industry that makes you go in and promise to buy a product before it is released so that you can get it when it is. I honestly try and go to Best Buy whenever possible for that reason, and the fact that Gamestop has abandoned the PC market. Yeah, that's pretty much why I've switched to Amazon (or Steam). (Well, that and the fact that home delivery eliminates the need to fight traffic on Rockville Pike.)

Concern: This is probably the only college textbook that has a chance of inducing motion sickness in a certain percentage of the class.

The reality of the "too big to fail" status that the top banks find themselves in is that excessive risk is not a problem-- the problem that these firms must avoid is unusual risk. So long as the big banks (and the small banks that emulate them) are all similar in the types of risk they take on, any failure will by "systemic" and will necessitate government intervention to avert a wholesale financial collapse. They can do some ridiculous crazy stuff, just as long as all their rivals are doing the same ridiculous crazy stuff. The problems in the financial industry and in the economy generally are a result of a generation of crappy leadership, both in business and in government. There are serious problems that have needed addressing for a long time, but the incentives for all the leaders involved is to dodge the real issues and do whatever they can to maintain the status quo just long enough that the next guy gets the blame when things fall apart. Sadly, I have seen no evidence that the current administration's approach in this regard is much different from the half-dozen that preceded it. And GD's recitation of the government responses to the crisis is ... confused. I don't know what this "first bailout" he's talking about is, but the TARP program was initiated with the passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (a well-dogeared copy of which is somewhere on my desk) in October of 2008. The auto bailout was rolled into TARP and done under its authority when efforts to pass a separate auto bill (which was supported by the lame-duck Bush administration) stalled in Congress. Much of the work in developing the program that was eventually put into action had been done under the supervision of Bush appointees. Although the scope and direction of the Stimulus act passed in February '09 (the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act," which primarily funds projects administered at the state level and isn't much related to the financial industry issues dealt with by the TARP) was certainly different under a Democratic administration & Congress than it would have been had the GOP ticket won the election, there really hasn't been much difference at all in how the two administrations involved have dealt with the financial markets and run the TARP.

I'm currently working my way up to taking on the Basilisks to the far East. IIRC, the "Greater" one brings in 7,000 XP. Korax the Ghoul is one of my favorite little episodes in the game.

Care to elaborate on how these movement penalties are implemented? Because if it affects the speed at which the player walks from point to point in the gameworld outside combat, that's going be become a significant reason for me to avoid character builds that use the heavy stuff.

Man, I'm actually playing BG1 right now, and those XP rewards have me drooling. I'm in early Chapter 5 (post-Cloakwood), and I think the most my party has gotten in one shot is 4,000. (Also, I am reminded of how much better the IWD background and character art is. Too bad that I never have the patience to actually plow through those levels. I've finished IWD once, and my only attempt to replay sputtered out somewhere in the Tomb of Endless Skeletons.)

GTA 3 and it's spinoffs. Although they certainly have their sections that require more concentration and focus, just driving around, listening to the fantastic radio content, and looking for jumps or hidden items is a great mindless time-sink.

Needs more Cleric options. Also, ToEE sucks.

For reference, Might & Magic I: The Secret of the Inner Sanctum:

M&M =/= HoMM Wizardry was basically the first popular CRPG. Might & Magic was an early competitor. (M&M 1 was my very first CRPG, played on my uncle's C-64.)

I voted IWD2. Also M&M 4-5 (which are really one honkin' huge game), mostly because of the wholly irrational nostalgia I have for the series. The World of Xeen is my favorite airplane time-killer on my tiny laptop.

We're getting pretty far afield here, but this is, I think, where you're wrong. The U.S. may be screwed, but the rest of the world is even more screwed. There simply are no credible threats to the Dollar at present or on the horizon. Sure, it may be worth $0.30 ten years from now, but everything else will be worth $0.10. P.S., Asset-based currencies are a disaster. Sure, the decisionmakers in the Fed make mistakes, but in the aggregate it has led to far better outcomes than what we got when the money supply was determined by the arbitrary fiat of how much gold (or whatever) happened to have been pulled out of the ground in a given year.

I doubt that they could get away with being that broad-brushed. But, that said, I don't know of any case where FF&C has been used to force a state to recognize a marriage that it didn't want to. For example, before state laws against interracial marriage were declared unconstitutional, there were some cases where states refused to recognize out-of-state interracial marriages. Suits to force them to recognize the weddings under FF&C failed.

That fits with my experience. If I've already bought and played through a game, a full-sized expansion is often sufficient reason for me to pull it out again and get back into playing it. But I haven't yet jumped back into any games based on the release of new $5 DLCs.

Well, to be fair, coming to a conclusion about the spiritual beliefs of a person who you've never even spoken with is hardly a "simple" matter. But, really, what we're seeing is "Muslim" being used as a shorthand for "un-American" by people who have been whipped into a frenzy of rage and who are thus willing to believe anything negative told to them about the current POTUS. The people responding to this survey don't think or care what Obama actually believes-- they're simply picking whichever answer comports most closely with their mental image of him as the Worst Thing That Has Ever Happened to America. There are always people on the fringes who think this way-- the alarming thing is that the radicalization of American politics has raised this figure to 18% (and that only accounts for the fringe on the rightward side of the spectrum).

Clearly missing a "my country can kick your country's ass" category. [chant]U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A![/chant]

I am either too drunk or not drunk enough to participate in this discussion. I can't decide which. Anyhow, back to that Manhattan...

The music was one of the few things about Arcanum that I really enjoyed. I did hear some of what I suspect was a solo violin playing minor-key stuff. Some solo fiddle would fit in with the "western" angle they're going for in New Vegas, but I wouldn't say the same about the string quartet chamber music that was featured in Arcanum. That said, the two would sound pretty much the same if you can only hear the lead voicing, and it's tough to hear much more than that on such a poor-quality recording.