Gorth

I'll get around to that one eventually. Had a level 20 Inquisitor once, but deleted him (as well as a level 22 jedi). This was *before* the barber shop and name changes, and I just hated either the looks or silly names I had ended up with for those characters.

I got a Chiss Sniper (level 26), a Zabrak Sith Juggernaut (level 27), a female human smuggler (level 28), a cyborg Commando (level 30) and ex-Gorth the Bounty Hunter now at level 38. So yeah, quite a bit of effort invested Not really into the Jedi/Sith stuff, but made an exception for the Sith Warrior, probably part because of the good acting. Yes, my sniper is incredibly good at the callous assassin type thing.

Han Solo versus Greedo in a fair fight, who would win? Yeah, those kinds of topics are usually silly. Borderline spam, since it doesn't add anything of value.

Closest thing to that would be an old Icewind Dale 2 game, featuring a barbarian family, including brothers Throg and Groth (lead by 'Gorth' of course)

Just an observation, having over time played around a bit with all base classes (taken at least one of each to a level where they got their ship), the differences in acting skills of the main performers sure is uneven. Bounty hunters and smugglers lead by a large margin on Gorth's leaderboard. Doesn't hurt either, since they are the ones I currently enjoy playing and pushing for high levels. Notable runner up being the imperial agents.

Nobody takes that "version" of cricket serious anyway... it's only for the attention span challenged Whats the fun in a game that is over in a single day? One days are still about some skill and can be very entertaining, its the twenty 20 cricket that I don't have much time for Meh, it's the "5 a side soccer" version of Cricket Real men drink beer throughout all of 'best of 5' of the 5 day matches.

I believe Bioware has quite competent artists. I suspect peoples "beef" is more with the decision making and the chosen art direction than with the people who have to work from those instructions. For what it's worth, my pet grievance with DA2 was not the art direction (it's only visuals) and not with the recycled assets (they may have been repetitive, but they were nicely done, at least the first few times you zoomed past them). It was with the dropping of a interesting new skill/combat mechanics system, that really only seemed to need tweaking, for a very bad, simplified system and even worse encounter design. They are the things you spend most of your time on in the game doing, they are the ones that should have been top notch. Your companions (well, the better half of them) were the redeeming feature of the game. The Withcer 2 on the other hand... I wonder if it's worth reinstalling to see if I have overlooked any redeeming features.

"Alive" is relative, but it exists and I think most of the forum history is available here, even if you need some good search-fu if looking for specifics Games are occasionally dirt cheap on steam (like $2.50 each) when on sale. That version of Kotor2 works with the TSLRCM mod too.

I never could get past the mini-games. I gave it a few tries, trying to get past the prologue/start, but every time the minigames reared their ugly head, I rage-quit DS III was too much hack and slash for me. Never liked the original Diablo, never liked games that had a similar game play mechanism, regardless of setting. Not just my thing. The rest is/are regular staples and gets replays every now and then.

Nobody takes that "version" of cricket serious anyway... it's only for the attention span challenged Whats the fun in a game that is over in a single day?

Pics or it didn't happen

I tried those new packs. Calling it a cut-scene would be "generous". It's a 10 second holovid. You get more story from the terminals in the FP boarding section, before starting a FP. It's ridiculous that it takes up an 'artifact' slot in the pack though, so no more packs for Gorth. Speaking of which, 'Gorth' is now dead (R.I.P.)... &^%$&* forced server transfers and involuntary name changes. Couldn't make any worthy replacement for 'Gorth' so I picked something from a comic 'MacRoth'. Yeah, silly, I know. But then, I found the forced name changes silly too. Closing in on level 37 and should probably do some of those flashpoints that my character has missed out on (since the Aussie servers started getting depopulated at the start of the month). Boarding Party and The Foundry are up next. I wonder if they have a suggestion box somewhere... I'm getting truly fed up with not having a 'global' (server wide?) ignore list and I'm sure I've added the same morons several times for my different toons. One list is 30+ names long. I really want to mark all toons of an account as ignore by all toons on my account.

A pox upon Samsung and their disastrously bad designs and manufacturing quality After getting rid of the flicker for a while (splitting the monitor, trying the "heat" treatment of the controller, reassembling etc.) it's back for good. Since a new monitor isn't on my budget until February, as part of a regularly schedule PC upgrade, I had to bite the bullet and ordered a smaller monitor to sort of carry me over until after New Year. This truly sucks. Did I mention I wouldn't touch a Samsung anything-with-electronics in it again? >_ Ordered a Dell 2713H which should hopefully arrive before the end of the week. Yeah, slumming it with 2560x1440 for the next half year by the looks of it

Cruel and unusual punishment?... Awesome pics Hurlshot.

I believe Syria is such a mess, that nobody, including the new Iranian president, is interested in getting their hands "dirty". Israel don't want Syrian troops to threaten the occupation of the Golan heights, nor do they want Hizbollah or AQ to gain influence. Russia doesn't want their access to the Mediterranean jeopardized, USA doesn't want to fight a war with no visible gains, Europe doesn't know what it wants, except bicker internally about it and in the meantime, thousands of people get killed for no good reason. It's currently a 3-way war between a motley, unorganised group of rebels, a motley group of religious fanatic rebels and militarily well equipped religious minority who doesn't want either rebel group to gain power. It's hard to support any side, because you will invariably end up supporting a side incidentally that you had no interest in supporting. Yeah, the new Iranian guy has his work cut out for him, not just with nuclear programs and surviving Iranian politics (which seems very similar to the late Roman Republic).

Yeah, where is the fun in quiet disdain? No fun in being silently smug, resting in the knowledge that my opinion is obviously superior. That would be depriving the rest of the world of my benevolent wisdom. Ergo, rejoice! Or some such. Maybe I need to cut down on the coffee a bit. On the other hand, it *is* Monday.

Tried playing SWTor on the new server I've moved some of my characters to (Begeren Colony). Ye gods, the technical issues are horrible, to the point of making the game *literally* unplayable. In an hour and a half, I got kick out by the server no less than 8 (yes, EIGHT!) times. Not talking about disconnections, those are easily fixed by logging in and continue where you were, but the game simply *kicks* you of the game, all the way to your desktop. Got kick out from a flashpoint, then twice from a warzone trying to play something of short duration. Ended back up in my ship. Then back to the Aussie server and played 4 hours without a single problem. I foresee my fascination with this game ends at the end of the month (when the local server shuts down for good).

Yay! Picture not working? Edit: Ok, clicking the link works. Maybe the https tags confuses the forum

I think that it's the fact that Bombs and splosions are controllable, more so than a gas. A bomb, you hit a spot, it explodes, and that spot is gone, you cut loose with Sarin and you've got your target zone, and anything down wind contaminated. It may be part of what causes the sentiment, but it's a truth with modifications. The long term effect of the landscape littered with DUP rounds and unexploded cluster bombs is still a subject of debate. Edit to add: Not condoning chemical weapons, just pointing out their propaganda value seems better than any military benefit, at least with the deployment methods available to the combatants.

"Jumping" a bit between games. In EUIII, Muscowy has expanded a bit, successful diplomacy (I was a lucky bastard and got a new monarch with diplomacy 9) has brought me claims on thrones of a number of the smaller states (Tver, Yaroslaw, Pskov) while anarchy in the Golden Horde after the untimely death of the khan means I could more or less unopposed settle a few provinces (targeting Samara as a priority because of the vast gold reserves). Needs to happen quick, as Lithuania, Bohemia and everybody else wants to participate in the great carving up the horde fest. When not subjugating the nomans, playing a bit of SWTor. Most of my characters have migrated by now, but my 3 key players are still residing in what is now truly a wasteland. Gorth (soon to be ex-gorth) completed Tattooine's main story a while ago, but after a brief visit to Alderaan decided to mop up on the desert world. It sure seems a lot bigger than Kotor1 let us to believe Being way overlevelled (35) at this time, he can solo through all the 'Heroic' missions without breaking a sweat. Noticed that passing level 30 added a number of bonus missions to the existing space missions. Horrible little time sinks, but not the worst mini-games I've seen. On a slightly related note, I noticed that it's just as well that I don't care much about 'achievements' as they are completely FUBAR in the character transfer process. At least the 'collections' things seems to work (and a very nice feature it is too), that is if you log out and delete the cache file in your program files folder every now and then.

Very subtle... You think your boss get the hint?

He probably can't count to 3 either

Heh, can't say anything negative about that... how many years have you spent on this now? 1.8.2 was sure worth it though (from a selfish player perspective).

Hmm, finally got around to see the videos. TW3? Major disappointment. Focus on bloom, soil erosion, twitch combat, slow-mo, kill cam and what have you. Surprised they didn't praise their blasted QTE's and minigames as unique [a]achievements[/s] (oops, shouldn't use that word, might just give them ideas), DA3? Meh. Didn't show anything other than having at least halfway competent animators and CGI artists. Time to go play some Conquistadors I think.

Entirely speculation on my part, but I suspect they have algorithms in place that triggers on key words and key sequences, like a heuristic analysis of whether or not a particular stream is of interest to monitor closer. It's probably also more targeted than just a shotgun shot in the dark (i.e. see above comments about industrial espionage and groupings/geographical areas of special interest). If homegrown terrorists are an anomaly, you can already start cutting down your target group to people who have either migrated the last 20 years or visited/traveled to "certain" areas/countries in the time. Still humongous amounts of data, but not necessarily a log of all the communications in the world. Interesting would be (if such was the case) to see the criteria for what would make it on such lists.