Enoch

Which would leave "real America" in the same situation Scotland would find itself: out of money. If you look at the balance of payments between each state's citizens and the federal government in aggregate, the net of federal taxes, spending, and transfers is, in effect, a whole lot of money being taken from the Northeast and the West Coast and given to the states in between.

Played some Dungeons of Dredmor today. I earned the (dubious) achievement for being killed by Dredmor. Character build was Unarmed, Shields, Throwing, Burglary, Dogding, Assassination, and Smithing.

Humanoid's advice is all excellent. When I was in practice, I was generally a Monarch player. I could get a Monarch game into an "I'm probably going to win this one" situation more often than not. (At which point I often lost interest and started over.) Although I tended to be selective in starting situations. (Not so much in selecting for ultra-advantageous starting positions, but for the type of start that I felt like playing at the time.)

On lower difficulty levels, it works rather well. On higher difficulty levels, pouring early resources into founding a religion is usually a sub-optimal move. Getting those land-improvement techs and figuring out where the copper & horses are generally pays better dividends. The longer-term problem with being a religion-monger is that the diplomatic penalties for having a different religion than your rivals are steep, and the AI civs tend to put a very high priority on prosthelytizing. The hammers you use to crank out Missionaries in a race to convert the outside world are often more useful elsewhere. Best option: Adopt whatever religion is dominant among your neighbors, let them spend all their production converting the masses (they'll even convert your cities if you have open borders), while your production is spent building units to conquer the holy city and reap the profits for yourself. (Alternately, if all the early religions end up founded on another continent or something, make a beeline for the tech that founds Confucionism. That way you'll at least be able to build temples and benefit from religion civics.) Once you get your feet beneath you, install the BUG mod. It changes nothing in gameplay, but adds a whole lot of improved feedback options. Tired of checking the diplomacy screen every turn to see whether anybody has any new techs to trade? Would like some warning before a city grows to the point where it becomes unhappy? Among other things, the BUG mod notifies you of stuff like this at the beginning of each turn, and it's very customizable.

Cleary this was their goal. As someone who is currently playing as a musician/mystic visionary in a scifi PnP setting (my character is essentially Sun Ra), that sounds like a lot of fun. I've never played the Cyberpunk game, but it sounds like a promising system/setting indeed.

The plan was to paint the basement over the long weekend. The previous owners had left it a hideous shade of lime green, and would've done the painting long ago except that I've spent a couple years debating whether we should paint now, or wait to rip out the cheap paneling and replace it with drywall. I bought the paint (a greyish blue) a month or two ago, but it's been a "maybe next weekend" thing awhile now. And then we were lazy on Saturday, and really didn't get started until Sunday morning. We finished at 11:15 PM on Monday night. Pro Tip: "Painting shoes" should not be whatever very old shoes you find lying around your house. The should be chosen for comfort, not just for willingness to get them stylishly spattered. You're likely to be standing in them for a long while, sometimes of footstools/ladders, and leaning in odd directions. Wow do my feet hurt. Anyhow, the yellow-green monster has been vanquished. I swear, the previous owners must have let their 5-year-old pick that paint color.

So... east side/west side won't just be LA gangsta's vs NYC gangs, but also Cubans vs Mexicans? Well demographically, Cubans aren't all that common outside of South Florida. People speaking Spanish in NYC are more likely to be of Puerto Rican origin than anything else. (Although, New York being New York, you can find pretty much every ethnicity/nationality you can imagine there. Including zombies.)

Yes. The sword decision will govern a) what happens to Flotsam (including the fate of folks like the cathouse madam), b) some of the details of the end-of-chapter mission (mostly whether Iorveth is leading it or not, if you're on his side) and c) which person Triss talks to through the megascope. (If you help Iorveth, you get to control Triss in a chat with Phillipa Eilheart; if you didn't, you control her talking with Dethmold.) That last one was the most surprising and interesting to me.

And, update: It's a bogus old story.

There's a statutory range of damages for copyright violations in US law. And it is rather high ($750-$30,000 per violation, or up to $150,000 if the violation was willful), to ensure that nobody figures out a way to profit off of copyright violations even with the fines added in as a cost of doing business. In pleading a case, you state the highest possible amount of damages that you could possibly be awarded, because you can't get anything that you don't first ask for. And if they can only actually prove one of those thousands of alleged violations, they want to get the highest possible amount of damages that they can.

He should play it, but he shouldn't be shy about looking up a walkthrough when the puzzles get a bit obtuse.

I suggest you play as a Thief, and make the Thief Sign to everybody you meet. I think CFG1 is the only one of that series that I've actually beaten. I was terrible at the combat system, and I don't think I had worked out that the games are structured such that you really need to spend some time grinding your skills higher in order to succeed.

Tempting sale this weekend. Alpha Centauri, Sim City 2K, Populus 1 & 2, and Dungeon Keeper 1 & 2 all rather cheap.

Leaving your other criticisms aside (many of which have validity), I wouldn't say that it's particularly fair to call D3 "pumped out." That term carries implications of hurriedness and inattention to detail that it appears to me are unfounded (see, e.g., how repeatedly delayed the game's release was; universality of reviews praising the game's attention to detail in things other than server stability). If they were "pumping this game out," they did a damn poor job of it. Anyhow, a friend of mine is working on convincing me to buy this, so that he, I, and his wife (and perhaps a to-be-named 4th party) can go through the campaign. I'm not much of an ARPG fan (Torchlight was fun for a while, but I only lasted long enough to see what the art style of the dungeon that contained the end boss looked like), but I'm tempted to go along from pure peer pressure.

Funny indeed. I have a rather vivid memory of driving to the game store in the mall a half-hour away from my parents' house (I was home for summer break after my Junior year of college) within a few days of their simultaneous release. I hit a fair amount of "people going to the beach" traffic, and it ended up taking a lot longer than I expected. And at the store I remember talking briefly to a mother and her roughly-11-year-old son about how excited they both were to get their hands on Diablo 2.

Not sure what "void" you're talking about. IWD and Diablo 2 were released on the same day. That said, I generally agree with your overall assessment of Diablo-esque ARPGs. Although I didn't actually play one until Torchlight. I got my $5 (hooray for Steam sales) worth of entertainment out of it, but I did feel little ashamed about the time it ate up. Anyhow, I'm playing TWitcher 2. The nerf to Quen that was put in at some point between January and now has made the first chapter a lot harder than it was when I played version 2.0.

I kinda hated how it was done in Chapter 1 to be honest, it felt incredibly heavy-handed to the point where it didn't feel believable anymore: it was a town made *exclusively* of complete ****. I think it was executed to much greater effect in Chapter 4, with the Vodyanoi, etc. There is definitely a dark side to the village, but it's not *all* there is to it. Also, Chapter 2 was the best part of the game for me.. it had some really messy translations and awkward sections, but the quest design and the strength of the underlying themes, writing, atmosphere and plot threads overcame that. Nothing like that in the sequel unfortunately I still think The Witcher 2 is by far the better game of the two by the way, I just hope that they go and take a good look at some things that worked in the original title and bring them back for the inevitable The Witcher 3: The Whoreson and the Ploughing Mutant. That's almost spot-on my take on the two games as well. The first 10-15 hourse of TW1 was a drag, in part because none of the characters seemed at all likeable (including the protagonist). The highpoint of my Twitchering experience was the series of quests you get in late chapter 2 and early chapter 3 of the original game that keep hammering on the theme of how a monster-slayer decides what is and what isn't a monster (and whether he wants to be a monster-slayer in the first place). The vampire whorehouse, the werewolf bit, the old cannibal in the swamp, the village that worships deep ones, the talking ghoul, and the whole bit with Shani wanting to domesticate Geralt all going on at roughly the same time really worked, to me, on a level that the writing in the second game didn't quite achieve. I first played the sequel back in January, so I delayed my second playthrough after I saw the announcement of the EE. I'll get on that as soon as I finish up with Legend of Grimrock.

It always struck me as oddly alien that the many of the core ideologues behind the French Revolution thought that the great thing that would be missed if they succeeded in defeating the influence of the Church was the experience of regular communitarian ritual. These thinkers were confident that they had exceeded what the Church offered in terms of philosophy, moral guidance, etc., but they felt that society might well crumble if the common people were no longer able to get together and chant in unison on a regular basis. Thus, they sort of adopted the Freemasons, and actively promoted the Masons as a secular source of ritualistic civic involvement. I guess that what they were seeing was a human need for a structured social/cultural experience that wasn't related to work. And, while the elites could attend their salons and discuss fancy philosphy, science, and literature, the common folk need a more dictatorial, ritual-based rubric. Of course, the 20th-Century decline of ritualistic fraternal orders like the Masons is well-documented. Modern folks seem to prefer their social and cultural experiences with a minimum of accompanying ritualism. (Indeed, this even reflects back to the original source-- take a look at the changes made to the Catholic Mass over the course of the 20th Century.) They want to see or experience something entertaining or otherwise fulfilling, and discuss and share it with people of their choosing. And, unlike 18th-Century audiences, they can choose to interact with people other than their neighbors.

I named my characters alphabetically so that I could easily keep track of my bodycount. My best attempt managed to get to the last level, clear the monster zoo there, and find Dredmor, but I used an invisibility potion to run away and explore a bit more, and a pack of Arch-Diggles took him down.

Hey, sometimes people like to... [sunglasses] Shoot the breeze. (I'm sorry.)

The credited answer for somebody new to Fallout 1 or 2 is to tag Small Guns, Speech, and one of Science, Repair, any thiefy skill, Doctor, or maybe Bigguns or Energy Weaps. Your SPECIAL should be Agility- and Intelligenge-heavy, as they determines the number of Action Points and Skill Points you get, respectively. Perks that increase the occurence and effectiveness of critical hits are the most valuable ones. Other builds (unarmed, for example) can work, but somebody new to the game would probably find them frustrating.

Shivering Isles took a year. Yeah, but Horse Armor was out in, like, 2 weeks.

Does not compute.

Youve got it backwards. Its: Liquor before beer, never fear. Beer before liquor, never sicker. Well, I'd argue that if you're drinking a half-bottle of whiskey plus a few beers in one night, the order you take them in is fairly unimportant. Anyhow, the tabletop RPG group I've been playing with has wrapped up its classical Greek campaign, which was great fun. (The primary villain was the rising expansionary influence of Rome-- the "end boss," if you will, was Consul Marcellus, who we killed to relieve the seige of Syracuse.) The next campaign has me a little nervous. GM responsibilities are shifting to a different player, who is very excited to be running a campaign based in the Farscape setting. Having watched a grand total of 3 Farscape episodes, I don't quite share his excitement (yet), but I'm willing to give it a chance. There is an officially licensed Farscape RPG system, but the GM didn't like that and has instead adapted a system that was designed for the Buffy/Angel setting. (He's apparently quite an afficianado of RPGs based on TV series that I've never watched much of.) I've never seen him run a game before, though, and I doubt he'll be as good as our previous GM, but he did do a good job putting together the rulebook and intro materials. We did character creation this week, and the system looks pretty cool. It included a method for creating your own alien race, which I was all over. I am rather excited about my character-- a non-combatant mystic illusionist and musician, heavily based on life, music, and philosophy of Sun Ra. (Well, if Sun Ra were a cycloptic telekinetic alien whose scream could melt metal.) I'm also excited by the fact that my wife came along and made a character. It will be quite interesting to see where this particular development goes.

I don't want to control their lives. I just want to see them to post stuff on their own forums, not a third-party message board Think of it from their point of view: You want to discuss stuff on the internet. Do do you so: (1) on forums owned by your employer and read by your co-workers and superiors, with clearly identified authorship, or (2) somewhere else, chosing for yourself whether you wish anonymity?