Gorth

What date is the Big Cheese's birthday? Any Obsidian fan would know. A bot would be very unlikely to guess it

Yes. I just experimented on your post

We might be a minority, but I liked SoZ best of the bunch. Only major detractor was some really, really bad voice acting. A case of less is more. Heck, much less would have been much better

Gratuitous Space Battles. Got it from one of the past 'Humble Bundles'. I'm seriously considering some of the expansions for it. There is something relaxing about just hitting the 'Fight' button once the planning and deployment is done.

It was thought about a long time ago (conversation from May last year) --- My 'why not' guess explanation: TIM has always been on the side of the Reapers. But the Reapers aren't monolithic. The Reaper handling the Collectors was part of a splinter group, going off the reservation with their "human reaper" experiments. TIM, allied with the main horde, was working towards the same goal via a different path-- making Shep into badass zombie cyborg. That he could test this badass zombie cyborg by using it to capture/destroy the work of a rival Reaper faction was a nice bonus. There is, as I see it, a certain similarity between both the Collectors' and Cerberus' pre-ME2 activities (sampling different weird galactic species and experimenting on them, etc.). Ah yes, makes sense. It's the faction that wants to build bigger and bigger reapers versus the faction that wants to build small, flexible Sheperd sized reapers. He is the 'prototype' without knowing it, getting pitted against the evolutionary dinosaurs of Reaperdom. There can be only one

If that was updated 01/2012, that would have been after the Southpark announcement? Very nice man... announcing that there is something unannounced. Maybe he takes bribes?

Saw the 'Iron Sky' trailer. Looks like the kind of Instant Classic that 'Dead Snow' was. Earth is under attack by Space Nazi's in UFO's.

I think I tried one of them, can't remember if it was the first or second one though. At the time I was in love with an Amiga shareware game though, called BattleForce. A turnbased RPG/Tactical combat hybrid mech game, so I never really looked closer at the "simple" action games of the time. Slave Zero however had that dystopian "Bladerunner" feel to the city fighting and destructible terrain. Something I'm a bit of a sucker for.

That was awesome. Mudcrabzilla? Who needs dragons in video games?

Best looking Mech game I've seen since Slave Zero (never tried BF2142). Not sure if it's more fun to play than Unreal though. Coop/Multiplayer?

Hehe... The story of O ... For those who don't know 'O', it's a notation for the relative complexity of an algorithm.

I think one problem may be that people, intentionally or not, equates The Smoking Man (sorry, just too many similarities to X-Files to not think of him) with Biowares writers and takes his words as the writers intentions. If I look at isolated incidents, I see gaps and holes in the story, but if I take two steps back and look at the big picture, I see a relatively simple story. TIM is lying through his teeth to manipulate Shepard into doing his biddng to the best of his ability. Collectors, to the player, never really comes across as a major military threat, limiting themselves to hit and run attacks and on top of that, seems happy for the time being to target only human colonies in that frontier space section that seems to be *not* under Alliance jurisdiction. On the contrary, I got the feeling that they (the colonies) didn't like the Alliance and outright resented Soldier Girl (what's her name you seem to know from the past) for being there and trying to put up some planetary defences. Maybe TIM has a suspicion that they are not a threat in a head on confrontation, but may be a strategic threat because their motives are unknown. Never saw that knee before it hit your crotch etc. They could have been building genetically engineered virus bombs for all we know. So, he picks up a resourceful guy from the freezer, puts him in the defrost program and instills some angst and sense of impending doom in him and sends him off to do the hard and dirty work, maybe even surviving in the process. Did anybody ever really verify that Earth was the target or was that just mentioned in passing by somebody impressed by the sheer size of the shelf space in the collector ship? Maybe they had a plan to lure the Alliance fleet away from Earth and forgot to leave notes lying about with an exposition on their plans for world domination? Honestly, I don't (or didn't) play Bioware games for their plots. Never cared much for saving Imoen either.

Good luck in Antarctica! Actually I bet the wifi is good in Antarctica, not too many people eating up bandwidth. Take care wherever you are going! My thoughts exacly. The Russians are currently in the lead last I read up on the under-ice lake exploration.

Am I going to regret googling 'Jersey Shore'?

They weren't known for the attacks on the human colonies, that was a secret. But if you picked up stuff from the various novels and comics, the Collectors as a "mysterious species" were well known in Omega and that region of space. Everyone knew they came through the Omega Relay, and they tended to turn up and conduct strange deals and collect species - aka, seemingly pull random slaving missions. Trade weird, advanced tech for specific odd genes, mutated creatures, and the like. They have that reputation of engimatic, not to be messed with that would be very similar to some darkly dangerous, semi-criminal group would have in those environments. Also, that they'd been around for a very long time, but no-one knew specific details about them.. Just that they had that sort of reputation. Ah, I only know what I'm actually told "in-game" @Malcador: Is that from the "Codex" entry of the gun? I might have skipped a bit on the reading there.

I tried to start a game of MotB around Christmas last year, but I just couldn't get into it. I would love to play through with One-of-Many, but I just can't stomach the "highlevel" play

Collectors edition of ME2?... there has to be a pun in there somewhere Romance option? Personally I think it's silly, but then I thought whoever did the voice acting for EDI did a great job of providing "it" with personality. I thought they didn't have much of a reputation at all, going to great lengths to remove all traces of their presence after raiding a colony? Only becasue that surviving Quarian (sp?) recording events on his iphone (qphone?) does Sheppard and Co. know for certain that somebody and their insects invaded a colony. Otherwise Collectors are known to intelligence services because of their shady dealings through strawmen and mercenaries. Wasn't the BFG of the Normandy based on the tech of that lizard-bird species that Garrus belongs to?

Sheesh guys, all that hostility over a video game? It's not like we are discussing articles of faith or something Anyway, thread way past the 500 post mark, time for a fresh start here

Start of old thread End of old thread New thread, new beginnings, new... something?

Would you be happy to know that the meter has changed several times? The most recently being in 1975, where it was based on the speed of light. Prior to that it was something like the wavelength of light from a krypton-86 lamp. Which was apparently asymmetric, hence the problem. And before that it was a particular metal bar. Which changed size depending on the room temperature...

Stop that. The original Syndicate was great (on the Amiga, in 1993). No idea about the PC version though, it might not have aged gracefully in the 20 years (almost) since then. It was better with the American Revolt expansion.

Slight spoilers... The first three party members you pick up is a fighter, thief and sorcerer, covering the "basics" of a party. Which means, you can play just about anything you like and the only of the traditional base classes in short supply is clerics. You can pick up a druid and a paladin later for all your spiritual needs though. Generally just pick some class you would like to play, odds are there will be npcs covering other skill areas. Whatever else you do, make sure you are least play the game up untill the point of "the trial". Worth it just for the laugh. The forced companions and bad grind (piss poor design decisions like enemies spawning out of thin air) can be a bit of a joy killer.

Well, plotholes or not, I did enjoy large parts of the game despite a number of shortcomings. Lets face it, the game was based on the idea that it should be about companion missions and somebody somewhere needed to come up with a pretext why you should move from the start of the game to the end of the game. Since there is a law somewhere that states that modern games needs mini games and boss fights, they had to throw in that too, plus the mandatory big baddie at the end. Lets make it a human shaped baddie just for dramatic effect, people probably won't care too much about trivial details when getting to this point in the game. Nothing exceptional really, it being tried a tested formula, not only in Bioware games. Heck, a number of Obsidian games do it too, following those written and unwritten conventions. The difference is in the window dressing. My biggest plot complaint was, why the heck should I... *I* for effins sake, Sheppard II "Reaperslayer", the Chosen one, waste 50% of my precious time that I should have spent as "quality time" together with Yeoman Chambers in my bunk, saving the galaxy, be spent on doing geological surveys of random space rocks? Something any Cerberus clerk with a few graduate astro-geologists could do in the background

Well, yeah, I wouldn't have a problem with the Collectors being a small hit-and-run force were it not for the fact that several of the characters outright state that they'd have to target earth to complete their human reaper, something which, given Earth's defenses and the minute scale of the Collector force, seems an outright impossibility. Once again, this seems like an oversight, not an intentional feature - BioWare could very well prove me wrong in ME3, but that opens a whole new can of worms as to why everyone in ME2 (most importantly Shepard) seems to labor under the illusion that the Collectors somehow pose a legitimate threat to alliance space (rather than simply the fringe colonies). It seems the options here are that the Collectors are stupidly weak and could not have ever completed their plans, or that Shepard and everyone he works with are effectively braindead for the entirety of ME2. I'm honestly not sure which of these I dislike the least. I lean towards one or more oversights in coordinating the story. Just as a thought experiment, if we assume the Collectors are not acting on their own, but being manipulated by the reapers like sock puppets (assuming control), a possible use for the reaper they are building (the giant T2 robot), could be a fifth columnist infiltrator Reaper, something like Sovereigns replacement, which would be a completely different level of threat. We don't know if they intended to harvest all of humanity first or just enough to finish the current WIP reaper (and then possess a completely different magnitude of firepower). Yes. the story has too many holes to really connect the dots. Maybe some of the DLC/Comics ties up the loose ends better?

To be fair, the collectors do have one thing that makes them a seemingly formidable foe. They can do hit and run attacks at will, as without the navigational equipment, nobody can give chase through the relays. As a gamer, you know/suspect their strength (or lack of), but only after passing through the relay to their base can you confirm that they are indeed not a military threat in a conventional warfare scenario. Never mind what their covert activities may or may not amount to on a strategic level in conflict.