Enoch

Doesn't seem surprising to me. Remember that Bethsoft is a publisher as well as a developer. As an independent development studio, I'm sure that Obsidian spends a lot of time pitching their development ideas to any publisher who will listen to them.

That'd be nice. We have too few games set on groovy 70's. Cheesy stadium rock music, disco boogie, trippy funk by George Clinton and the Funkadelic, early punk like The Ramones and New York Dolls. I was sooooo disappointed when I found out that GTA: San Andreas was going to be set in a more modern period. California just screamed out for a '70s setting-- Oakland in particular was the pimpin' capital of the world back then.

We need more good games and less Arcanum.

I need more information on how the game is structured in order to have a strong opinion about the size/content that would be appropriate for DLC or expansions. Tentatively, given how much the appeal of the game seems to be on long-range consequences for decisions, integration of the DLC/expansion with the rest of the game will be rather difficult. And, if that integration isn't done (e.g., just some self-contained mission content with additional enemies and l00t) I probably wouldn't consider it worth buying.

Why wouldn't the Vaults be clustered around a major metropolitan area? The people with spots reserved would have to be able to get there from their homes/businesses on pretty short notice.

Trailer. No in-game video; really just a tone-setting FMV piece.

Unlike "evil." Oh, wait...

Volo, you are the only sane gamer at the Codex which means I really don't consider you a Codexer. That should be their motto: "Making Volourn Look Sane Since 1998!"

To clarify: I found MotB's story compelling enough to suffer through all the fighting, up until the point where the "wot's this all about" mystery is solved-- i.e., when you finally get to chat with Safiya's mum. Without the mystery, the third act was just another "go talk to X and fetch Y." (Sure, X was a god and Y was my soul, but as I mentioned earlier, it's tough for me to read all that FR cosmology stuff and not laugh.) The character writing was 'pretty good,' but not fantastic-- better than based NWN2 or Dragon Age, but not up to the KotOR2/P:ST standard. (Safiya and Daughter-of-Trias had something to them, but I just found Son-of-Ravel annoying. And most of my curiousity about them was satisfied once I got them up to 100 influence.) @ Boo, that is a decent review. It does over-emphasize some of the negative stuff, but reading it in concert with some of the more breathless early reviews would lead to a pretty accurate view of the game.

You know, that one should really be in spoiler tags with a health warning. If Americans click on it, they'll have cardiac arrests, seizures, whatever The rates are comparatively high, but most U.S. states (and many cities) have sales taxes that total in the 5-10% range. It differs from a VAT because it is only assessed on the total price at the final point of sale (so, for example, wholesaler-to-retailer sales are untaxed), but it is similar in effect. Methods of taxation vary by government level in the U.S., but generally, Federal taxes are income taxes, State taxes are sales and/or income taxes (usually some combination of the two, but some states have all one or the other), and municipality/county taxes are property and/or sales taxes.

This is by far the best Visceris post I have ever read.

"[R]eally, really disliked" is probably too strong a statement for me, but I wasn't particularly enchanted with it. I find it very difficult to take FR cosmology seriously, which made the moments that were supposed to be profound rather humdrum. ("Oh, look, a dead god-- don't they kill, like, three of them off every year?") Also, epic-level D&D is teh sukk. I was so bored with the combat that I stopped playing for months once I finally had that chat with Safiya's mum and resolved the central mystery of the plot. Had to force myself to keep on and play until the end.

I wonder if you can still gun down opponents with your fires-at-the-speed-of-light cannon while you easily dodge their painfully slow rockets and glowythings.

Check out the triangles: Mystery hub = San Antonio? Or maybe that's Alpha Protocol HQ? Those little circles scattered about in various world capitals are also interesting.

At the risk of derailing the discussion into a whole different kind of flamewar, the ugliness long-range projections are driven primarily by projected increases in healthcare costs . Science keeps coming up with ways to keep 80-year-olds alive to see 81, at astounding costs, and, as a society, we haven't come up with a good way to say "no, it's time for Grandma to go." America spends 16% of its entire gross domestic product on healthcare costs of some kind (by comparison, most other developed nations are in the 8-11% range), and, although a lot of that is necessary to keep the economically productive part of the country going, the fastest growing portion is elder care, which, from a purely economic point of view, has a rather small benefit accruing to the society as a whole. (My favorite "it'll never happen, but would work pretty well if it did" thought experiment: Take the Medicare statute and change "over 65" to "under 65"-- insure the health of the younger, economically productive population and make treatment beyond that point a luxury expense.) I've been lukewarm on the current attempts at reform because, although I recognize that the present system is unteneble, I am not convinced that the cost containment efforts it includes are adequate. In a more general sense, federal fiscal problems are the sort of problem that American democracy is structurally very poor at addressing. It affects everyone a little bit, but is the first concern of only a few voters. With single-member districts in winner-take-all plurality elections, voters' 3rd priorities just don't get expressed. And, although some like to talk a big game (mostly on the GOP side), once in power the incentive to actually roll back spending is very low. (Indeed, the biggest increase in future-year government liabilities in the last several decades was the Medicare prescription drug benefit that the Bush administration championed.) Throw in the ridiculousness of the Senate-- where people representing only 12% of the U.S. population can stop pretty much anything from happening-- and any existing program that is only a little bit popular is probably going to be sticking around for a long time, and raising taxes to pay for it is very very hard to do. The general post-WW2 American setup of a government that is around 30-35% of GDP is, I think, a good model. Lower taxes and a freer business environment than Europe and the other Western powers, generally, but still a solid G presence, providing those services that government can do better/fairer than the private sector for a variety of market-failure related reasons. But there is clearly some work needed to undo some of the calcification of interests that have built up over the years. And to address what the last generation of poor financial and governmental leadership has done do the nation's banking system, but that's another rant entirely.

(Springsteen cover)

I think that Grobnar redeemed himself long before that. His heartbreaking response to Shandra's death was the emotional highlight of the game.

So, is this advice on a gift for sluggo's ladyfriend, Kor's ex, Kor's ex's kid, or all three? I'm betting all three. Yesterday I came home from work to find that the ice dams resulting from the slow melt of the 40-ish inches of snow we got 2 weeks ago had ripped a section of rain gutter off my house. The gutter still appears to be useable, but the wood that the screws pulled out of was left rather cracked and splintered, such that it's going to be difficult to get new screws to anchor properly.

You must live in some bizarre universe where Star Trek is still relevant. Well, there was a film bearing that name that grossed $385,000,000 just last year... ME2 didn't scale the balance well across difficulty levels. I'm a believer that game balance is best judged at the default difficulty (or perhaps 1 step tougher), but the way that they scaled the difficulty up (giving more enemies shields/armor/barriers) has a very different effect depending on the class you are playing. Judging things based on Insanity alone is just silly.

Perfect.

Janis Joplin -- Summertime

I always associated "auteur" more with level of control over the creative process and the degree to which a particular work reflects the vision of a single person, rather than having anything to do with thematic consistency across different works. Am I off-base on this?

Thinking back-- one thing that disappointed me was that there was never any explanation of the introduction. (Minor Spoilers follow) Just after running through the whole robot uprising on the Lazarus station, it occured to me how contrived the whole situation was. It happens to come when Shep is ready to wake up; there happens to be a weapon stored 20 feet away from Shep's hospital bed (!); we're led to believe that it was initiated by a Doctor and that he did so not with something subtle and within his expertise like mis-dosing Shep's medication, but by hacking weak combat robots to go nuts (why were there so many security bots on the station, anyway?); and it is never explained to whom or what this Doctor was reporting. That's either a case of narrative reasonableness taking a backseat to gameplay demands (lame), or it was deliberate sabotage initiated by TIM for the express purpose of testing whether he could trust in the competence of the newly-rebuilt Shepard. It would've been very cool if the latter option were the case, and if Shep had somehow gotten clued in to this and been able to rant a little bit at Miranda and TIM about it. But that moment never came, and instead we're left wondering if Bio had simply blown their credible-introduction-writing wad on Dragon Age.

Eh. The Jungle was a thinly-disguised bit of socialist propaganda that nobody would remember if it hadn't also happened to be one of the immediate causes of some much-needed regulation of industrial food processing. Currently reading James Ellroy's The Big Nowhere.

Really, unless you bought yourself some fish or want to play dress-up, there's no reason to ever even go up to Shep's cabin.