Enoch

Yeah, that's exactly why I quit Bioshock after about 4 hours.

I now expect a report on which words from the Infinite Jest Vocabulary Glossary work in Scribblenauts.

Time for Week 2 picks! Carolina @ Atlanta Minnesota @ Detroit Cincinnati @ Green Bay Arizona @ Jacksonville Oakland @ Kansas City New England @ NY Jets New Orleans @ Philadelphia Houston @ Tennessee St. Louis @ Washington Tampa Bay @ Buffalo Seattle @ San Francisco Pittsburgh @ Chicago Cleveland @ Denver Baltimore @ San Diego NY Giants @ Dallas Indianapolis @ Miami I'd love to pick my Giants to wipe the smirk off of Jerrah's face in his ego-dome's opening game. I do think that NY has an overall stronger team, but they have just enough nagging injuries on defense (CB Aaron Ross & DT Chris Canty will miss the game, and CB Kevin Dockery & S Kenny Phillips will probably be playing at less than 100%) for me to lean towards Dallas this week. Plus, with their inexperienced WRs and with their 2 big offseason acquisitions (Canty and LB Michael Boley) missing most of training camp with various injuries, I always expected the team to start a bit slowly. Then again, the Dallas D looked absolutely awful against Tampa last week, so this may be an instance where neither defense gets many stops and the last team with the ball ends up winning. Also, I set the over-under on drunken fistfights among the reported 30,000 standing-room-only tickets at 500.

My first ME character was an infiltrator. Enjoyable run. Pop is right about the Sniper being only occasionally useful (and not really of much benefit until you've put significant points in it), but I really didn't find any of the secondary weapon skills to be all that useful-- one of pistol/AR handles everything well enough that you're better off spending the points elsewhere instead of picking up another gun. It was nice to have Shepard take care of unlocking and decrypting, which means that you don't have to take along a techie companion if you don't want to. But Tali and the Birdman are two of the better companions, anyway, so it's no big deal to be tied to having one of them around. The game is easy enough to be forgiving about character builds, though, and it gives you pretty good information about what the effects are of adding points to each of your skills. Just read what the effects are and conclude for yourself which thresholds are worth aiming for first. Oh, and play as a female. The VO is infinitely better.

Even if Bethesda has no interest in a MMO, it makes sense to exercise their (presumed) contractual right to prevent it. They don't want to see a sub-par product on the shelf next to their future Fallout titles, detracting from the overall value of the brand name. (Dare I mention FOBOS?)

I suggest applying the "seriously, people, they are just games" sentiment to the rest of the above post.

Hmm... The updated Civ4 AI is a bit trickier than it used to be. Mansa planted one of those limited-space backfill cities up against my border. I figured it was always be a runt, stunted by my cultural influence and likely to be a good starting point for an eventual conquest. Then, with the free Great Artist he got for being the first to discover Music, he "culture bombed" the city (the instant +5000 culture power of the GA). In the past, I had only seen the AI use a culture bomb if it were pushing for the cultural victory conditions. Now some of my cities, including the second one I founded, are giving up territory to that little burg. That "eventual conquest" just got a lot more imminent...

Got the itch to play some Civ today, so I updated my Civ4BTS to the 3.19 patch that came out a couple months ago, applied the fan-made 3.19 unofficial patch, and added the newest version of the BTS Unaltered Gameplay or "BUG" Mod (a fantastic mod that improves a lot in the game without touching the core gameplay, mostly by supplementing the feedback the game gives you by informing you at the start of each turn what new diplomatic options are available, what cities are about to grow/shrink/become unhappy, etc.). Started up a game as Hannibal on Prince level (one below my standard playing level, to accommodate for rustiness) and got rolling. Got a coastal start with a jungle to the north, and went with a peaceful expansion opening, planning my cities to box out Mansa to the north and Peter to the East. Fun!

Beatles -- Across the Universe

Picks: Dolphins @ Falcons Chiefs @ Ravens Eagles @ Panthers Broncos @ Bengals Vikings @ Browns Jets @ Texans Jags @ Colts Lions @ Saints Cowboys @ Bucs 49ers @ Cardinals Redskins @ Giants Rams @ Seahawks Bears @ Packers Bills @ Patriots Chargers @ Raiders Probably not picking enough upsets for Week 1, but it's tough to decide which other ones are most likely.

Winning the big one doesn't mean that every aspect of their game was great-- the sum total just turned out to be better than the teams they faced in the playoffs. It doesn't change my point that they had a poor rushing offense in 2008, that it looks like their 2009 rushing offense will be similarly poor, and that they are more effective in a shotgun 3-wide scheme than they are in their base offense.

?? In their 3 playoff games, PIT had 165 rushing yards on 42 carries (3.9 avg), 52 on 28 (1.9 avg.), and 58 on 26 (2.2 avg.). For the rushing offense, that's one OK game against the Chargers (average on a per-play basis, boosted by an unusually large of attempts, mostly in protecting the lead they built up), and two awful games against Baltimore and Arizona. Sure the Baltimore D is really good, but the other two weren't top-10 run defenses or anything.

They didn't last season-- their 3.7 yards/attempt was 29th in the League. Sure, they'll improve their rushing results from what they accomplished this week (not playing against the Titans defense will help), but they're not a 'run-first' team anymore. And they shouldn't be-- the run is important in two ways in the modern NFL: 1) as a threat to keep the defense from focusing too heavily on the pass, and 2) to eat the clock when you have a lead in the second half. It can be an effective way to get you that lead in the first place, but a good passing game is a far more efficient and effective way to do that than is a good running game. The 'prevent' defense gets a bad rap. Commentators are quick to notice and blame it when it fails, but when it succeeds, they just blame poor offensive execution. Coaches watch a lot more game film a lot more closely than fans, commentators, and sportswriters do, and they keep calling the prevent for a reason. Personally, I think the core problem isn't the scheme that coaches call in those situations-- it's the predictability. Going 'prevent' on the majority of snaps while protecting a lead late in a game is good strategy, but you still should vary it up a little bit from time to time to keep the offense guessing. I'm not expert enough to say whether the Titans were doing that or not (it could've been in their coverage schemes rather than in the number of rushers). It's clear that something didn't work right, but it could easily have been mistakes in coverage or the down linemen (who had previously been getting good pressure without blitzes) tiring out in the face of the no-huddle.

It was a great game, although I'll defend Bironas a bit-- getting one blocked isn't his fault, and the one he shanked was off a really terrible snap. I think the lesson at the close of the game is more for Pittsburgh than it is for the Titans. Their run blocking is lousy, and the offense moves the ball much better when they go shotgun 3-wide and just let Ben wing it. Their drives were grinding to a halt when they were wasting downs trying to run the ball.

I agree, but I doubt that "demo feedback" has much of anything to do with it. At this point, it's all about hunting and killing bugs. They'll release the game as quickly as they can once QA decides that it is clean enough to go to the public.

I remember that one! Entertaining, but frustrating. As I recall, there were far too many ways you could screw up in ways that would not be obvious until much much later in the game, forcing huge-backtracking reloads or restarts.

Garcia never made much sense for the Raiders. His skillset is perfect for a team that wants lots of 4-yard completions, not a run-run-run-BOMB offense like the Raiders seem to be constructing. Plus, he's 39. To the extent that there is any hope for that team, it's in their developing into a good squad 2 seasons from now. Starting a 39-year-old quarterback just so that he can retire when the rest of the team rounds into place isn't a particularly sound plan. In the interim, they might be able to go 6-10 with him, but that's not all that different from the 4-12 they can go without him, while either developing Russell or seeing enough of him to realize that they need to start over at the position.

Firing Offensive Coordinators is all the rage these days. Following the precedent of the Chiefs and Bucs: the Buffalo Bills. What to make of all this? Are the head coaches getting their scapegoats lined up for certain-to-be-disappointing seasons?

Yes. All the series names mentioned in this thread are new to me, so they must've come out since I lost interest, ca. 1997.

For groundbreaking, how about Guitar Hero? Also, Wii Bowling. (Seriously, is there anyone who hasn't had an enormous amount of fun with some friends, some booze, and Wii Bowling?)

I only have level 3 in Dominate. Didn't seem to be worth further investment since it doesn't work on vampires and the like. And, as I said, I kind of suck at finding the right discipline to use on the mouse wheel in the midst of combat. (I also keep forgetting to put the good armor on.)

It's stable because a relatively large percentage of the economy is based on extraction of raw resources. (The Canadian Dollar is similar in this regard, although it is more tied to the USD due to the interconnectedness of the US-CAN economies.) This is spillover from China's stimulus. The Chinese government poured a huge amount of money and credit into their economy to keep their people at work in the face of a 20% decline in exports. A lot of this money went to purchase of raw materials from abroad, and Australia is a major source. Of course, when this blows up in the Chinese government's face, the Aussie economy is going to stumble. As with central planning in any economy, the risk is that when capital allocation is decided by politics and bureaucracy instead of by rationally projected returns on investment, bad decisions get made. (And there is a reason why the reaction of rational profit-seeking companies to a sharp decline in demand for exports isn't to go about building more export capacity.) If Chinese exports don't bounce back quickly, recovering the 20% year-to-year drop and then some, so that the all the new capacity the government stimulus is building has something to do, a lot of loans are going to go bad, a lot of plants are going to close down, and a lot of unemployed citizens are going to be out on the streets, ready to riot. And, of course, a recovery in Chinese exports depends mostly on a recovery in American consumer confidence. The news reports all try to be sunny (e.g., spinning a reduction in the rate of decline as if it were the same as actual growth), but consumer confidence tends to lag things like foreclosures (still high), bank failures (still high), and unemployment (still high).

I wouldn't call the Blue Moon Hotel combat-slog-ish. I was able to talk or sneak my way through a great deal of the game. If the Blue Moon hotel is the name of the massage parlor where informant #1's kidnapped daughter was held, I tried to do that one stealthily. (If it isn't, theny I don't think I've been there yet-- I just killed Johnny and met "Mandarin.") But I was spotted upstairs and simply wasted the 4 or 5 punks I found there. From there to the ambush in the warehouse, and all the guards at Glaze turning on me, I was getting rather tired of plowing through tong thugs. (After dying twice because I'm not good at fumbling through my disciplines in combat, I decided just to get out of Glaze by turning on Bloodshield, jumping off the balcony and running for the door.) My big complaint, though, is that I think the game would be much more enjoyable if they simply cut these last few missions out and just had informant #1 point me to the Fu building. If you're not going to introduce any new enemies, puzzles, tactical situations, interesting locations, or memorable characters, there's no reason to have the quest in the game. I'm playing a Tremere and I've only put a moderate investment in stealth so far (and nothing into Auspex), so most of the tougher stealth missions I've tried have been reload-fests. I'm good at completing the "don't kill anyone" missions because the AI sucks at pursuit after they've been Tranced or Purged. But the "don't let anyone even see you" ones take many tries to get right. I suppose I should either invest more in stealth (and I do have 20 or so XP to spend) or stop trying these kind of quests. Where is the point of diminishing returns on investment in persuade?

I am becoming bored with Bloodlines. The main quest missions have been far too combat-slog-ish lately, and the combat mechanics are not nearly fun enough to justify it. I've now gone through what feels like an endless series of informants w/r/t finding the missing nosferatu in Chinatown, all of whom are wholly useless beyond giving me the name of the next informant, and giving me a reason to hack through a crowd of punks. I haven't met any interesting characters or learned anything useful about the story or gameworld since the first conversation I had when I got to Chinatown. Coming right on the heels of the interminable series of dungeons leading up to finding the nosferatu hideout, this all feels like pointless gamelength-padding.

What, no Civilization IV? Loses points in the "groundbreaking" area (unlike, say, Alpha Centauri), and how it is remembered will probably be heavily influenced by how the inevitable Civilization V is received. But it certainly earns mucho points for overall excellence.