Enoch

For my part, time is usually at a greater premium than money. Replaying games is all well and good, but nearly every game is at least somewhat less satisfying on the second go-round. And at some point, the decline in the satisfaction one gets from one particular leisure activity is going to lead a person to switch to a different leisure activity (or, god forbid, more time spent working). The game's purchase price is a sunk cost at that point-- increasing the perceived value that I get out of that expenditure is nice, but it doesn't make a game any more fun. Now, the price of a replacement leisure activity might be a barrier here, but in the current era of plentiful cheap retro games, netflix instant movies, and the like, it's less of a barrier than it used to be. (Hell, who doesn't have a backlog of games they've been wanting to play, movies/shows they've been wanting to watch, and books they've been wanting to read?) My general rule of thumb is that I stop playing a game when I decide that I would be having more fun starting a new game of Civilization instead.

Unfortunately.. not a sundial. The nicely done stone bird bath.. which at the time was rather frozen under that snow. Attach small pole in the middle and paint a few markings around the outside, and it can be both!

Tiny linen closet, most of which is now taken up by air conditioning ducts. (Until some recently innovated techniques, retrofitting a house built in the '30s for AC tended to eat up a lot of closet space.)

I am one step closer to living inside an Escher print: (Real story: Parents were visiting and helping with house project stuff. Master bedroom is upstairs, but had no door installed (the stairway comes up into middle of room, and there isn't space for any kind of landing at the bottom). The house came with the door and hardware that matches the rest of the house, but it was lying on the floor in the basement, presumably because the way it opens is really awkward to the flow of traffic on the first floor. We'd like to have a door on our bedroom, and we reasoned that it would work better if the door opened swinging inward on left-hand hinges, rather than the right-hand hinges that were on the door and doorframe. Also, the handle should be higher off the ground because the stairs are immediately on the other side, and when exiting one is usually opening the door from 2-3 steps up. Faced with the prospect of reversing hinges, removing the old handle, filling the handle-hole, drilling a new handle-hole, and re-installing the handle, my Dad reasoned that it would be far simpler to flip the door upside-down, which would accomplish both the reversing of the opening direction and the raising of the handle height at once. And, it looks much cooler, too.)

Or maybe Josh just made himself some Cantonese dinner (and got a little scorched in the process).

As I understand it, the Demo only gets counted if you 'log in' to your EA/BW online account with it on. There's probably a way to play the demo without it adding up to their total But, yeah, this is weird from two angles. First, "if lots of people play the demo, we'll make the game easier" (which is all that giving free GP & XP does) doesn't make much sense to me. Second, if these books actually have any narrative content (e.g., an interesting item description), are they really going to hold them back if they fall short of their goal?

Well, there are also a number of indie in-browser games that explore that kind of thing. (e.g., Every Day the Same Dream, You Have One Chance) But they're more participatory thought experiments than they are games. And they're also free and take 10 minutes to play, so the player investment in a successful outcome is minimal. Part of me agrees with Tale, in that the fallout among fans would be spectacular to behold. But there is no way in hell that a major studio would end a 10-30 hour, $60 game like that.

I do think that ME2 missed an opportunity to require some sacrifice by the player, making the ending more of a qualified success. But, really, are there any single-player games outside the various "strategy" genres where the player "failing" yeilds anything other than a death screen and a reload?

Just 1 DLC and a patch. It's the "Dead Money" mission that has already been released for the three-hundred-and-sixtieth Xbox. The other DLCs don't yet have release dates. Or any kind of promotion, other than the subtle hints that are in the game.

No, a patch is coming out. As I understand it, it's both. The Dead Money DLC is getting its PC release, and there's a patch coming along at the same time, which will address both DLC integration and the fixes Josh and others have mentioned.

Also, what exactly are Rogue-Hawke's dual-weilded... things? They look more like the blade from my food processor than they do any practical weapon. (And, given how often I cut myself on that blade just trying to clean it, the giant version is not something I'd be eager to pick up and swing around.) Between that and the silly-big greatsword the Warrior swings about as if it were made of bamboo, it's going to be tough for me not to pick the "play as mage" option. So, humorous hero names? "Mike Hawke" is overplayed. But Bio did a pretty good job picking a last name that is somewhat resistant to mockery outside of that and the rather lame ornithological options (Sharp-shinned Hawke, Red-tailed Hawke, Sparrow Hawke, etc.). An axe-wielding warrior named "Tomma Hawke"? Weak. "Pierce-Eye Hawke" is probably the most marginally clever one I can come up with, but I don't particularly want to play a wisecracking spirit healer.

Wow, I'm really going to miss the fully-zoomed-out view. I guess I got used to the perspective used in the KotORs, so I can get used to it here. And there is still a tactical pause function where you can issue orders, right? It's so weird to me to see someone controlling a fight like that without pausing every 3 seconds.

I guess I'll be the downer. A history degree is doubtless better than no degree, as it opens up those career paths for which a BA is a necessary pre-condition. But it also doesn't offer much in the way of meaningful advantages over any other flavor of BA. And don't count on grad school unless you're paying for it yourself or you're already really good at it and at a university with some name-recognition in academic circles. (Military history in particular is for dilettantes. It sells a lot of pop-history books, but it's not the most fruitful field out there for people looking to do original academic research.) The field for graduate applicants is extremely competitive, especially at the top schools. And the people who hire for academic jobs are prestige whores-- an advanced degree in a humanities field from Northern State A&M U don't get you much in the way of employment opportunities. Obviously, you don't want to paint yourself into a field that is going to make you miserable. But if there are career paths stemming from a more practical major that don't make you contemplate methods of suicide, well, you can always read history books as a hobby. As an aside, if you can handle the math, a master's degree in statistics is probably the most practical and flexible credential I can imagine. Just like every 15th century town needed to have a blacksmith, every entity and institution around in the 21st century-- companies, governments, nonprofits, you name it-- needs to have useful data.

Arcade's default Plasma Defender works pretty well-- not an automatic, but a pretty high rate-of-fire.

What's with the shoulder-horns that disappear after the cut to camera 2?

FYI: Valentine's Day cocktail of choice: The Jasmine 1.5 oz. gin 1 oz. Cointreau 0.75 oz. Campari 0.5 oz. fresh lemon juice Garnish: either lemon or orange peel, as you wish. A cocktail that is: a) pink, b) not sickeningly sweet, and c) not a Cosmopolitan. Edit: I have to use nefarious methods to evade the spam filter in order to properly type the word for a pleasant mixed alcoholic beverage.

I'm guessing that the dominant outlook on Valentine's Day around these parts is summarized . Wals' tale has inspired me to expand the repertoire of chest-pounding poetry that I can recite by memory. I think I've got a few anthologies around here that I can study from. (A college roommate and I always talked about crashing campus poetry-readings by doing a full-length dramatic reading of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," but we never actually pulled it off. Not least because reading the damn thing out loud takes about 45 minutes.)

Standard cazadore tactic is to go equip a reasonably high-DPS weapon with a low AP cost, go to VATS once they reach a reasonable range, and aim for the wings. Once you put them on the ground, your companions can finish them off. Although it is easy to get in trouble if you pull too many at once. Edit: mixed up my DAM/DPS shorthand.

hahaha And you probably get Renegade points for it, too. Something I find annoying about ME2. If I want to run a professional ship, apparently that makes me a jerk. The idea actually hit me in ME1. We rescue Liara, Joker makes some flip comment, Liara asks how he can make jokes after we all almost died, the renegade dialogue wheel option is "He's a jerk," and the VO says "Joker can be a real ass sometimes." That was a great moment. And it kinda made me think about what it would be like to be on rather small ship trying to command a guy like Joker for a long period of time. I realized that I would despise that guy. Too bad the game doesn't let you obstinately call him "Helmsman Moreau" instead of his silly nickname. But, yeah, if you're aiming for Paragon points, this kind of thing getting in the way can be really irritating. My favorite example is in ME1, when the Alliance admiral shows up to inspect the Normandy. The only procedurally proper thing to do is to deny him entry, as he has absolutely no jurisdiction over a ship and crew that has been signed over to the Citadel for use by a Council Spectre. (Indeed, it impugns the independence of the Spectre in question.) But that means renegade points. So (to steer this post back to the thread's ostensible topic) I do like that the DA games have abandoned alignment counters. Although now that they've also abandoned fully-written-out protagonist dialogue choices, the lack of alignment-based sorting does put more onus on their getting the Dialogue Wheel descriptions to be accurate. When there's a clear "Good on top, Evil on bottom" setup, it's easier to get away with minimal descriptions of the response options.

Is that what the kids are calling it these days? It's gotten to the point where I kind of enjoy slamming the door on any and all Bioware NPCs who start suggesting a more personal relationship. When that's the way they reward displays of empathy, I start turning into a real jerk. I've been messing around with ME2 again lately, going with the character idea that Shepard doesn't actually like any of these people-- you don't take your friends on suicide missions. It was rather satisfying to respond to the YouveGotMail Chick's "Please, call me Kelly" by picking the dialogue-wheel option labeled "No."

You know, it really would be kind of entertaining to have a game manual where every skill and ability came with 5th-degree polynomial graphs to show the continuum of marginal efficacy at different investment levels.

Huh? I think Gromnir's point here is that saying that "no solution is ideal" is an easy excuse that people use to get out of doing the work to come up with a better solution than currently exists. The obvious boss retort is "that may be true, but it's your job to try."

Fried pork chops are good. For whatever reason, I had never actually had a real fried pork chop before. Grilled, dry-seared, breaded and baked, sure, but never a nicely seasoned shallow-fried chop with a nice crust. In case any are similarly lacking, here's the technique: 4 3/4-inch-thick pork chops. Trim excess fat and pat dry. Cut a couple of little notches in the meat of each chop, opposite the bone-- this will prevent the chop from "cupping" as one side heats (and contracts) while the other side is out of the oil. Season with spice rub (mix of some garlic powder, cayenne, paprika, dried mustard, salt, pepper). Dredge in flour, shaking off excess. Let sit for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, cut 3 strips of bacon into bits, and fry them in the big pan you intend to use for the pork-- 3 minutes on high should render all the fat out. Remove solid bacon bits (eat them later). After the chops have sat for 10 mins, the salt on the pork should've produced enough moisture to soak through the flour coating. Good. Give the chops a second dredge through the flour. Add 1/2 cup of canola oil to the bacon grease in the pan, with the heat still on. When that gets hot enough (just starting to smoke), add the chops. About 3.5 minutes per side, depending on thickness and starting temperature. Evacuate the chops to a cooling rack to rest for a couple minutes before serving. The pre-dredge seasoning is key-- a lot of recipes will tell you to add spices to the dredging flour, which is dumb because very little of that flour actually ends up on the meat. "Spices first" ensures that each chop gets a good layer of flavor under the crust.

I started playing Half-Life last night. I had bought it for a couple bucks in a Steam sale at least a year ago and never got around to trying it. (I'm not normally a shooter fan, but since everyone seems to agree that it's a classic, I decided to check it out.) But I've found that, much like the only other Valve game I've played (Portal), after about 45 minutes of playing, I get a lovely case of motion sickness. Which is odd, because I'm generally OK with other first-person games as long as I can toggle the "head bob" option off. I had thought that the vertigo-effect that Portal frequently induces (i.e., entering a portal and not knowing which way is up) was the cause here, but now I'm thinking that it has something to do with how Valve designs their engines. Portal, fortunately, was short enough to finish pretty quickly, even while playing in half-hour increments. How long does a playthrough of Half-Life typically take? I have enjoyed it so far-- lots of clever design in the introductory sequence and the first few areas.

I have good memories of Sierra/Dynamix's Aces of the Deep-- a WW2 U-boat sim that is heavy on the historical accuracy. (The manual was basically a textbook.) But that came out in 1994, so finding a copy and getting it to run might be a challenge.