Enoch

I finally caved in and got Dead Money and while story & characters are interesting, I can now totally understand why people complained about the gameplay. It's just not fun. The constant BEEP BEEP BEEP is simply maddening. Luckily I have a character with 100 Stealth & Light Step perk so the first part of the DLC was smooth sailing. I can't fathom how a character without those abilities would be able to get through it without going insane, though. I also don't understand why your character loses all gear at the beginning... aren't the collars enough? Seems pretty stupid for Father Elijah to rid his lackeys off all their gear if he wants them to survive in one of the most dangerous areas of the Mojave. Overall, very mixed feelings. God's companion Perk that has the same effect as Light Step. I generally would take him along for the first sweep through an area. The collar-beeping didn't bug me all that much-- I approached like I would a puzzle game and found some satisfaction in probing where I could and couldn't go and figuring out how to open up new areas for exploration. The constant health draining, though, was a source of much stress until I found the code to get Stimpaks from the vending machines.

Wow. This is really awful. Wals asks for some music to induce bootyshakin, and you all offer 1 credible option, followed by a stream of awful 90s dance-pop. C'mon, people, it's not that hard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynfk7izWNE8

Drinking negronis (it is Negroni Season, after all) while listening to the 2008 "Mingus Epitaph" concert. Also watching the cat sit on the radiator and observe/smell whatever is going on out the open window. It's a pleasant evening.

Anyone else finds it funny that Chris Avellone and Jason Bergman are interviewed by one of the Voice Cast ? Yeah, nothing says "Journalistic Integrity" quite like airing an interview conducted by somebody on your payroll.

I'm just going to assume you meant "within 5 minutes of getting to Klamath in Fallout 2." I simply cannot believe that anybody has ever had any measurable amount of fun playing through the Temple of Trials.

I discovered to my shock and disappointment last night that 4 of the 6 members of the PnP gaming group I play with have never played Planescape: Torment. I have begun spamming the associated facebook group with links and testimonials.

Have you read the book of the new sun? I concur that The Book of the New Sun is the most interestingly written fantasy-ish fiction I've read.

While the execution issue is certainly pertinent, it goes deeper than that-- the problem with making the audience doubt the narrator's truthfulness in a game is that the gaming audience has miles more personal investment in the story than does the audience for a book or movie. Players don't want be told (or have it implied) that all or part of what they have just accomplished was a flagrant lie or exaggeration. It's weakens whatever feeling of accomplishment they're getting from making progress in the game's challenges.

Somewhat. But it is far more geek to have in-depth internet arguments about which elements of a fantasy book were borrowed by a particular fantasy vidyagame.

There's something ironic about the guy in the George R.R. Martin-related thread who hasn't read the books being the one who steers the discussion into a tangential food description. All of the SoIaF books would be measurably thinner if Martin was capable of saying "Then they ate lunch." and actually leaving it there. Those of us who have read the books probably hit Monte's post, thought "another damned roasted rabbit description," and reflexively started skimming to see when the topic went back to the action.

It was only 1 station, but it was the main transfer hub downtown (and it was right around the release date). I rather liked that I was commuting by so many Fallout ads every day. I mean, I was as nervous as any around here that Bethesda would screw it all up and make Oblivion-with-Guns. But I like Fallout stuff, and the ads they came up with were pretty damn cool. Gamebryo-fugliness aside, art direction was the area where Fallout 3 was strongest. As far as Licking the ***hole of the Sky, they've got a tougher row to hoe, as ads laden with Swords & Dragons just don't have the distinctive attention-grabbing potential that Fallout's core grim-nuclear-desolation-juxtaposed-with-50s-gee-whiz-optimism does.

But governments focusing on it and thus creating an incentive to advance the technology, so the companies can make money, is good - no? Depends. If the return on that investment turns out to be good, then sure. But the problem with governmental incentives is that good projects (i.e., ones likely to have a strong ROI) would be getting plenty of private financing even without them, so they end up either A) further enriching the successes that would've happened anyway or B) funding marginal pursuits with a low success rate. I'm not a big "Markets are efficient, and Governments can only screw them up by meddling!!" advocate, but the case against subsidy is probably where that crowd's logic is at its strongest. At best, you might generate some comparative advantage, promoting domestic rather than foreign development/production of a particular technology that was almost certain to come along whether you acted or not. If you don't run afoul of WTO anti-subsidy rules. (That said, the water gets considerably muddied where the energy sources that you're looking to displace have large subsidies of their own and generate significant external costs (e.g., environmental damage; risks of catastrophe) that aren't fully captured in the price seen by consumers. An attempt at a counter-balancing subsidy might be the least-bad of the politically teneble options available. But even in that case there are a lot of ways for it to get screwed up on the way.)

The Russian Oligarchy/Kleptocracy is busy looting the country's petroleum resources for as much short-term personal benefit they can get, using decades-old technology. (The modern tech is generally in the hands of US/British/Dutch companies, who know better than to invest seriously in a nation with such a tenuous relationship with the rule of law.) The way they're going, it's going to run out within the next decade or so. China is still using coal for the vast majority of its power-- I'm not sure why people would think they'd be a net exporter. While the source of production does hold some considerable political power, the force that controls the pipelines and shipping lanes has much more-- they can starve both the exporters and importers if and when they want to.

Two "Bug or Feature?" questions: - I've noticed that a lot of the locations don't show up as 'hollow' destinations on my compass. (The Aerie; Burial Mounds; a Bridge or two) A screwup, or intended to encourage free-form exploration? - The Cazadore spawning around the Burial Mounds is ... touchy. A mistake, or a partly-scripted ambush?

None of your believers are going to donate their life savings to you to secure the salvation of their Great^10 Grandchildren. Now who isn't thinking ahead??!

Who's to say that isn't what I do? However, I probably could've probably saved myself a lot of effort and pulled an "Irving Washington," just blacking out the whole post.

Season 2 is going to be difficult for the producers. So much of that book is just " ." The story arcs told in the chapters are just depressing. The audience needs at least a little something cheerful to root for. Maybe they'll follow , which all happened "off-screen" in the books. Apart from that, are probably the only highnotes.

And a happy 70th birthday to Bob! To commemorate, here is a Peanuts strip from roughly 40 years ago:

Same here. I blame the fish.

Same. If I'm interested enough to watch then I'm going to want to play myself, and I don't want to watch someone else do it and have it spoiled. Clearly, you all didn't grow up in an environment where your next door neighbor had an NES, and you didn't. Sure, we'd take turns when appropriate, but sometimes you have to take what you can get. (This also might explain why I find less satisfaction in the thumb-agility element of gaming than most people seem to. He was nearly always better than I was at the games, so I found my satisfaction in figuring them out ("Try bombing that wall over there") moreso than actually playing them.)

A surplus of dudes with minimal prospect of finding boobs/sex/marriage has historically been a rather unhealthy thing for overall societal stability. You see this mostly in societies with widely-practiced patriarchal polygamy, where elites hoard the available women. If they're not exiled, made to die in wars, or dealt with in some other fashion, these surplus dudes have a tendency to glom on to whatever revolutionary movement happens by (including violent extremism).

Based solely on name and the Vault-Boy art, "Sneering Imperialist" is my new favorite Perk.

It was much-discussed way back when BG2 first came out. The Golden Pantaloons were conspicuously the only BG1 item that actually imported into the sequel. Also, in Spellhold, one of the insane mages gives you a scroll filled with apparent nonsense. That nonsense is actually a simple rotational cypher that translates into a rant about how you should "always keep the pantaloons." Among the players who were following the Black Isle forums back when ToB first hit the streets, plenty of people made sure to have at least one savegame with the right stuff in their inventory. (IMO, the payoff in ToB was rather lame-- another bit of epic cheese in a game already chocked-full of it-- and somewhat overly impressed with its own cleverness. But I guess some people liked it.)

It's a particular bit of flesh whose job is to keep the top and bottom parts of your knee together and in a stable enough position so the joint can both support weight and hinge properly.

Doh. I think I finished the game with 2 G'valchirs. I took one from the Huntsman, because my steel sword was weaker than my silver one at the time, and I didn't realize that the dentist would give me another one when I gave him the boxer's tooth.