Enoch

It has to be the latter. We've seen the sub-son ammo used in gameplay videos-- they're not going to show off features in their PR that aren't in the base game. Which makes it kind of a lame bonus, but IMO, all of these little retailer pot-sweeteners are pretty lame. They're nearly always add-ons thrown together after the game is done. The playtesting, balancing, etc., was all done without them, and sometimes it shows.

Torchlight. I bought it for $5 in a Steam sale a few weeks ago, and I just got around to installing it. Some nice mindless fun, so far.

The Nats currently have their first winning record since April of 2008!

For those following at home, "fizzy vitamin thing" = "gin and tonic." I did a whole lot of clothes shopping today, then came home and made a nice pasta primavera. Roasted some sliced red pepper, green & yellow squash, broccoli, asparagus, and carrot, sauteed some onion and garlic, tossed the roasted veg into the saute pan, added some pasta, lemon, white wine, asiago cheese, and some sliced up chicken breast I had grilled earlier this week. Lovely.

From a more mainstream account of the election: Any crank can get 10% of the votes if they're the only one listed as running against an incumbent-- all incumbents make some enemies, and those enemies like to vote against them, regardless of who else is running. And if that crank happens to be an arguably hot chick, the numbers go up a little bit.

They did hire Jorge "Oscuro" Salgado to work on FO3. If I recall correctly, he's from Spain.

Questioner: "For a laid-back, turn-based, long-time role-playing gamer..." MCA: "Yes, we have basically screwed you. And we did that intentionally." Bulock (I think): "And you better enjoy it" MCA: "You know what, it's because we hate you, too." BWAHAHAHAAHAHA!!!

Oooh! Confirmed reactivity to Thorton's armor/apparel/etc. in a some dialogues at around the 13:00 mark. Also: That Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game for Intellivision was awesome. The references to Xcom, Half-life 2, Daggerfall, and such may have flown over my head, but I got that one!

I don't recall the F1 or F2 manual having anything along the lines of "Warning: the following skills are nearly useless" or "Tag Small guns and Speech for EZ Mode."

It's not so much the goggles that hurt in that instance-- it's that you've made the scene too dark to begin with. You want to give the player a visually interesting environment. If you turn all the lights out, everything looks the same (with or without night vision goggles). That's boring. Plus, night vision goggles do nothing to mitigate the most serious risk of a pitch black video game environment.

That said, there are times when the demands of verisimilitude make ugly night-filters a better option. I hated the way the night vision spells/potions looked in Oblivion and The Witcher, but it is better to have that option than it is to make the player carry a light source or to put eternal torches in every troll cave. With a game like AP, where the action is presumably all going to be taking place in environments inhabited by humans, it's easier to rationalize some lights being on. (I haven't played any of the modern roguelike/action games, so I really don't know whether or how they have included night vision.)

I generally agree, but there is a corresponding benefit to Bethesda's approach-- it mitigates concerns about blindsiding a player with unexpectedly poor skill balance, which is something the first two Fallouts did a lot of. If you started your first character in Fallout with tags in Gambling, Outdoorsman, and Energy Weapons, you'd probably be quitting in frustration within a few hours. F3's approach to allow more of the important decision-making to take place after the player has experienced some of the game makes the game more accessable to those without meta-knowledge of the challenges the game offers. Now, the best way to solve this would be to have better skill balance. But skill balance is never going to be perfect, and allowing more flexibility to shift the priorities in one's character build in-game does have its benefits. (Although Bethesda almost certainly went too far in letting characters max way too many skills.)

The problem is how you represent them to the player in a 3rd-person game. If you just put them on the player's avatar without changing the view the player sees on his/her monitor, they become little more than a fancy hat with a few stat bonuses for the dolly-dress-up element of the RPG. ("The Goggles, they do nothing!") If you tint the whole environment to make it 'realistic' when Thorton dons the goggles, you're undoing much of the work that your artists, et al., did to make the environments look good. There's a reason that you don't see them much in the spy films that inspired AP-- the scene would have to be too dark to film in order for there to be much reason to use them. And in a visual medium like film (and games), I think it's better to compromise verisimilitude a tiny bit (by putting at least minimal lighting in your scenes) than it is to undermine the audience's visual experience by putting scenes in a green haze or in too-dark-to-see lighting.

My bathroom scale this morning told me that the weight listed on my drivers license is actually accurate! Also, I ordered myself a new notebook. A relatively tiny machine (11.6" screen), but with better-than-netbook innards, for a little under $500. The whole order came to $543, with a neoprene sleeve and a new cordless mouse.

Same. My first guess was pornstar-- really, look at that name!

Addendum: Visually, clear the clutter out of the frames-- you want enough background stuff so that the reader understands the setting, but no more (unless there are interesting jokes filling in the gaps). Make a better effort to differentiate your panel frames from their content (different pen or whatever). Get better drawing tools.

That's odd. I always assumed that the hardcore Fallout purist crowd really liked the taste of bile.

Cartooning advice from Bill Griffith (creator of Zippy the Pinhead) (Hat tip to boingboing, which linked this yesterday)

Honestly, it's pointless to speculate. The employment contract has clearly been breached. The only question is which party breached it first, and we can't know that unless we have both a copy of the contract, and access to 24/7 surveillance video of all the interested parties over the span of days and weeks in question. Edit: Or, what Gorth said yesterday.

I Bring the Funk:

Wow. Best of luck. Exactly how incapacitated do you mean by "out of action"? Edit: I am currently awaiting delivery of a new refrigerator. The old one was slowly dying (it was running all the time and failing to achieve adequate temperatures), so we ordered a replacement over the weekend. This morning I have emptied the old one, taken the doors off (necessary to get it through the kitchen door), cleaned the area underneath it (disgusting), and unhooked the water supply to the icemaker. It is now smack in the middle of the 2-hour timeframe the delivery company gave me.

They have Ben's Chili Bowl in the stadium. Who needs quality baseball when you've got a chili half-smoke??!

I wouldn't say I'm obsessed, but I do find myself thinking about the game at odd times. Example: I just received my copy of the Spring 2010 William & Mary Alumni Magazine. One of the story titles on the cover simply said "Spy Game." Chris Avellone also being a W&M Alum, I quickly jumped to the conclusion that they had chatted with him about his involvement in AP. Sadly, I found that the story was about an alum from '49 who played professional tennis as a cover for working for the CIA in the '50s.

By the way, it's not really the fact that the payments are to be made to Brazilians that bothers me. To me, a country influencing foreign relations via bribery is not any more or less objectionable than influencing foreign relations by the implicit threat of stockpiling things that can blow people up. Both have their place and should be used by any country trying to maximize its pull on world affairs. This is more a case of 1) disregarding one's treaty obligations by buying off the people who point out violations of agreed-to principals rather than by correcting these violations, and 2) a continuation of the monstrous pile of idiocy that is American agricultural policy. Also, what happens when some other cotton-exporting WTO member nation (China, India, Pakistan, Turkey, etc.) brings the same complaint about U.S. cotton subsidies before the WTO? The WTO decisionmaking would almost certainly be the same-- would the U.S. bribe those countries out of seeking retaliatory sanctions, too?

Wait... How many millions are in a brazilian? /oldjoke Anyhow, I agree wholly with the point that U.S. farm subsidies are enormously bad policy for a large number of reasons. I do wonder where the USTR and the Department of Agriculture is getting the money, though. Is "bribing Brazilian farmers to stop them from pursuing WTO sanctions" a permissible use of any of their current appropriations, or are they going to have to ask Congress for it specifically? It probably doesn't matter, though-- the over-representation of rural states in Congress has led to a ridiculous amount of agribusiness ass-kissing, so they probably won't be shy about adding a few million more.